New Years Blues

Hurrah 2008 has arrived, I spent a bucked load of money, ate lots of food and drank until I dropped. This only left me with new years blues. I came back to work today and just felt blah!!! It will take me more than a day and a half to shake it off...

Optimism about the new year? Nope, this only left me with anxiety. Behind the planned fireworks, champagne and beach party, the year 2008 is already taking a psychological toll on me.

December I started feeling an intensification of the sense that we're coming to the close of another year. The blues started. What have I done with my life? What is the meaning of life? Where do I go from here? A few curve balls were thrown at me the past year, but I did great. To be honest in 2007 I thought I would be rich, retired and sitting on a beach with my husband. How naive I was back then. I've been on a roller-coaster ride, but the prospects for 2008 are definitely looking better. January is possibly the worst month of the year for me as it is a major reality check. I realised that my body can't handle anymore alcohol and my bank account no longer wants to feed me cash from the ATM... my boyfriend (last 8 years) don't even want to get engaged and I'm back at work.

Apparently this happens at the close of every year. New Year's Eve is supposed to be an exciting, exhilarating experience of letting out the old and thinking of the new. But in reality that is not how it is. Things don't just go away.

At the root of those blues is the psychological whip of the holiday season - the expectations which is in absolute overdrive in anticipation of this year's blow-out... add to the specific and rather unusual focus of New Years Eve: myself. It's a time for introspection and reflections - for people like myself who aren't drunk.... (of course celebrations and alcohol goes hand in hand. My mother warned that if I'm feeling down it might be a good idea to go easy on the champagne. Alcohol is a depressant. It brings on depressing feelings and it has a lingering kind of impact on the depletion of energy. For someone who is depressed, alcohol is absolutely toxic. Instead of thinking about pain, they try to cover it up by taking action)

This is the time where it is particularly difficult for myself, my life is not perfect (although this might be a surprise to my friends). Society gives us the message that we should be happy, enjoying ourselves and taking stock. But my response is, I'm not happy, I'm taking stock and I'm miserable. And everyone else is happy?

Feelings as on 02 Jan 2008 - hopelessness, helplessness and isolation... the perfect combination or medium for depression to grow...

... my life up to this point and what lies ahead...

I'll try and use to control what lies ahead with resolutions... however I know that my resolutions are often carelessly made and seldom followed through on. The problem with my resolutions are the expectations - as I don't make realistic ones. I encourage goals, but setting resolutions tends to set you up to fail!

However, the positive thing about my resolutions are that they center on the assessment of where I am at and where I want to be - the setting of goals. Negative is, I tend to have this all or nothing idea of a resolution and if it doesn't work out there is a sense of failure...

This brings me to my 2008 resolutions (which I will list in a separate post) I will make them so simple, clear and immediately useful that I can't fail to achieve them... My resolutions will mean resolving to make a small improvement in my daily life.

New Year's Eve is a marker of time - both passed and to come. This might be the most emotionally troublesome aspect. Amongst the so-called booming economy, we have more poverty than ever before, tension, pain and heartache... that was supposed to have been cured. I'm supposed to be happy. But I feel empty. Now, it's all over and I have an even deeper sense of emptiness...

How do I overcome the January blues (as this is now longer just a New Years Eve blue!). I need the month of January to disappear just as fast as it has arrived. Working in a Shopping Mall - the retail shops tend to think we should go out and spend more money on their sales, although if they seen my bank account they wouldn't dare let me step over their front door... Retail therapy is definitely not going to work this month!

I think I'll just hibernate until the month of February, the month in which I will turn 27 and I still need a list of things to do before I turn 27!