Laying off the wallowing

Well, I'm not laying off all of the wallowing, per se; I'm just playing on phrases. I was laid off on Monday, and I'm laying off of my wallowing over that. At the very least, I'm trying. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

Last Tuesday, way back then, I was in the grips of a pretty significant manic cycle. I was delusional. So delusional, that I was believing that I had a deep connection with nature. More than that, I think. I think I believed I was the personification of Nature. The human form of it. I was able to experience the breath of trees, and communicate with any outdoor plant that I could find. And at the time, it all seemed very normal and profound--still when I think about it, I remember it being very normal, even though logically, it sounds off to me.

My therapy group was concerned about my experience (as was true of pretty much everyone else I told--my family, Arun), and they made me promise that if the delusion continued or worsened into Wednesday, that I should go into the hospital for evaluation. Wednesday came and with it hallucinations and continued delusions. I tried to go to work anyway--oh, did I mention that I was trying to work through all of this?--but ultimately, it proved to be a futile effort. I called Arun to come and pick me up early that morning. We were in the ER by 10:00 AM.

Once all things were said and done, I was admitted. I made my necessary phone calls to my boss and therapists to cancel out of my duties and appointments while I was in the hospital. Then came the medication changes. The delusions and hallucinations fell away and gave way to sleep, a lot of sleep. Once rest came back into the picture, I think that my mania was finally given some time to get under control. I hadn't been sleeping very well for a couple of weeks prior. By Friday morning, I was stabilized in terms of no hallucinations or delusions, so I was signed off as able to go home that afternoon.

But the medication was making me sedated. Without the manic energy to counter the sedating effects, I was left to be a zombie on it. I knew that continuing at the prescribed dose would leave me as a catatonic mess at work on Monday. So, I decided to take it into my own hands over the weekend. I took half of the prescribed dose on Saturday, and found that to be still overly sedating, and then just didn't take any on Sunday. That worked. I still had some symptoms of mania, but no hallucinations or delusions, so I figured that was fine. I didn't take any on Monday either, and I figured that was good--because now, I could focus on work. And focus I could, and focus I did.

At 3:00 PM, in the middle of something, I was pulled into the Director of Operations office by our HR representative. I already knew what was coming, because I had been waiting for it since my FMLA ran out a couple of weeks before. You see, due to my mental illness, I have missed many days of work, had to re-arrange schedules, caused undue stress on the department, and essentially been an unreliable asset to the company for over a year. And I don't care what the law says about FMLA protection; that still hurts a company's opinion of an employee over a long period of time. In short, I expected to get fired, not laid off. So, when the excuse came for cost-cutting measures and my position being eliminated and absorbed into another department, I began to feel like was floating numbly. They were covering up their tracks pretty well, but I know that my position can't be eliminated; my department was growing, not shrinking... We just hired someone. They also said that my position was being absorbed by Accounting. 90% of my job was not accounting related--it was shipping/customer relations related. The other 10% was billing-related, sure. Anyway, there are a lot of suspect reasons to consider, but the point is, I was laid off with a four week severance... What catches me up is that my boss claims not to have known anything. That is very bizarre to me, because one would think he'd be one of the people who would know who was being cut to save money. He did offer to be a personal reference and to write a recommendation letter if need-be--so did the Director of Ops. So, even though I suspect that I was leaving of semi-shady terms, it's not completely bad. I just wish I could understand.

Whether or not I deserved it, and whether or not it was fair doesn't matter. I'm grieving the loss of a job I loved pretty much completely, and people who I thought were always there for me (and I think they probably still are). I can't shake the feeling that if I hadn't had ended up in the hospital last January, or taken FMLA last November, or needed to arrange my schedule around therapy appointments, that my job might still be there. But what do "what ifs" do beside make us sadder?

Since then, I've been in a floating, numb state. I haven't wanted to do much of anything other than sleep. The depression bug has bitten me, which is timely, considering the manic cycle has just ended. That, and we had such a fitting trigger for it, too. I'm making a plan to do some more productive things next week; we'll see how that goes. I need to figure out what I want first.