Recovery Post Workplace Abuse: This Blog

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Why do I write this blog?  Especially when it brings me back to a bad time and place?  A place I am still recovering from.  

My blog, which mirrors my recovery, is all over the map.  Not only is it irregular in topic, jumping from one topic to another, then back again, before going on to something else entirely different. Or stopping suddenly, just when it's getting interesting, and not going back? It is also irregular in posting.  For a period of time, the posts will come regularly, like clockwork, around 9 a.m. Monday to Friday.  And then suddenly miss a day - or two - or three.  Or even stop?

This is not the way to build up a regular readership.  I know that.

Yet, this blog is about recovery from workplace bullying.

Specifically, it is about my recovery from workplace bullying.

While I'm currently very much in the process of recovery.

Which is the reason it tends to be irregular at times - in both content and posting.

For me, recovery is a long-term process.  Like my counselling has been.  Especially if you realize that  for me recovery and counselling are very much intertwined.  I can't have one without the other.

My counselling allows me a chance to "debrief" what I've processed on the road to recovery.  For years, it was every two weeks.  Then earlier this year, we transitioned to every four weeks and now to every two weeks.

That in itself is a significant step on the road to recovery.  It means that I'm more and more able to handle whatever is happening in my life and need less "debriefing".  Yet, it also means that I'm processing more life incidents in between debriefings or sessions.

Which seems to mean I get tired easily.  I either take long naps in the afternoon ... or I end up going to bed early, very early, like at a time when the evening is just getting started for most people..

The processing in and of itself seems to bog me down periodically.  Lethargy ensues for periods of time.  Listlessness.

I know I'm in trouble when I don't feel like creating.

Speaking of creating, though, writing is another form of creating.  Just like the knitting and crocheting.  Except my materials are the computer, words, this blog.  

My motivation when I first started this blog was to have samples of my writing style to show prospective editors.  Which is why it's called Ramblings of a Deranged Mind.  I simply wanted something catching.  In fact, I'd had the idea of starting a blog years before I ever put one finger to keyboard.  I'd even gotten it set up on Blogger, but had never posted anything.  This was before I realized that recovery, for me, is very much a long-term work.  It seems to always be a work in progress.

As time went on, and I took a blogging course, I realized that I did indeed have a platform - and that platform, that main focus, is twofold:  workplace bullying and recovery from workplace bullying.  My blog, therefore, became more focussed.

I also realized that many people have been - and are still being - bullied in the workplace.  I'm not the only one.

I may be one of the few who is willing to be open and transparent about what happened, but I'm not the only one.

As I open myself up, others have opened themselves up to me about their various experiences of bullying:  at work, on the school bus, in the neighbourhood, at church.  Bullying knows no boundaries.  It crosses all lines.

The biggest sameness about the stories is the damage, frustration and confusion it causes those who became entrapped in its grips along with the silence.  Those stories, those hurts stay hidden in the subconscious.  Untreated they don't go away, they just lie buried like the dust bunnies under the bed.

Having said all that, the reason this blog has its irregularities is because it mirrors life:  my life specifically.

My progress on the road to recovery.  A path that is not charted.  I have no workbooks, no guidelines.  It's all a "do it yourself" kind of thing - with help, of course, from my therapist, my doctor, and a few long-suffering friends and family members.

It's a trial and error kind of thing.  Back and forth.

So when I find that a topic is becoming too much for me, i.e. the recent one on serial bullying where my research is so uncannily similar to what I experienced that it would be easier to copy and paste the entire article and redact out the pieces that don't fit, then to write about what does fit - which is most of the article.

I had to stop that theme, probably temporarily, so I can process those things - come to terms with them - and eventually let them go.  

So the times you don't hear from me are the times I'm down for the count.  Lethargic.  Listless.  The processing times.  The times when I feel like I am slogging through a very muddy field which is sucking my boots down at each step requiring more energy than I have to make it through that field to the other, dryer end.  The times that come before the victory.

Yet I am convinced that recovery, complete recovery, is coming.  It may not look like what I envisioned at the start.  But it will come.  My body may never soar gliding the currents in the wind like the above picture of a seagull, but I firmly believe that my soul will glide again.

Until tomorrow....