Tag: depression

The Frustrated CFO’s Means of Self-Therapy


Alt-J at Terminal 5 03/24/2013, photo by MZI was standing there at Terminal 5 yesterday, listening to Alt-J performing their 2012 Mercury Prize winning album An Awesome Wave live, cheering with the rest of the audience at the first notes of each song in recognition of their sublime quality.  And once again a familiar notion formed inside my head.  It happens to me every time I experience something that momentarily separates my  being from all the negative garbage in my life.  I think, "If I didn't keep on, I wouldn't have received this gift, I wouldn't have come to know these songs, I wouldn't be bobbing in rhythm right now."

I claw my way through the long stretches of hard life, full of frustration and disappointments, from one moment like this to another.  This is what forces me to continue – the hope that there is another wonder ahead.  And when they come, I use them as my self-therapy: I imprint the intimacy of the experience in my memory and let it carry me over the next hurdle. 

It's like mantra:  If I didn't endure I wouldn't have exited the Bullet train onto the platform of Shuzenji station and felt my rusty armor melting away; I wouldn't have seen that astonishing photo my daughter took a few months ago; I wouldn't have watched Radiohead, The Mars Volta, Tool do their on-stage magic;  I wouldn't have heard Andrew Bird's heavenly sounds in the Guggenheim and in the Riverside Church; I wouldn't have read new Egan, Carson, Cunningham; I wouldn't have stood in the middle of the Red Forest breathing the ancient clarity…  And I wouldn't have been at Terminal 5 yesterday.

So, here is my personal tip for everyone who, like me, is overwhelmed with frustration and prone to desperation: find something powerful that can make you forget about the dread, look for opportunities to experience it whenever you can, and hold on to the sensory memory of each occasion for as long as the shittiness of this life allows you.  And let's hope that the gaps between the moments of joy will not get any longer then they already are.

Acknowledgements:

I would like to thank my daughter for treating her mother as an equal and sharing all kinds of awesomeness.  And thank you very much, the dude from Bumblefuck, IL.

 

That Elusive Sense of Self-Worth


Sad_clown_by_danluxeThe other day one young woman was telling me about her dinner with Mr. X.  The man was not in a good place: he was being down on himself, feeling gloomy, dissatisfied, depressed. 

I know a thing or two about Mr. X and even met him a few times.  By conventional standards, he is, to put it mildly, a very accomplished and impressive guy.  A self-made man, he has spent the last three decades propelling himself into a progressively narrower sector of the income-distribution pie.  Forgoing leisure, he devoted most of his waking hours to his work: hundreds of companies successfully bought, restructured, guided to success, sold – efforts resulting in considerable wealth shared by him and his partners.  Now, in his middle age, he is at the point, where the proverbial 1% seems to him like a large group of people with meager resources.  Not only that he warranted the best opportunities for the future generations of his offspring, but he has the luxury to be generous to other individuals, and very charitable to organizations of important cultural value.  

So, what could possibly make this strong, smart, and powerful person with a long list of achievements hate on himself?  The destruction of the planet?  The intellectual downfall of humanity?  Maybe he feels inadequate as a parent?  Those are universal equalizers that should make us all feel agitated.  Should, but not necessarily do.  As it turns out, it's his professional self-assessment: he feels that he could've done better for the partnership; that he didn't achieve his best results.  He gives his performance a moderate grade of B+.

How curious…  I constantly feel like a career failure as well.  Only my reasons are sort of the opposite of Mr. X's.  I know that I've given 110% to every job.  From a purely academic standpoint, my professional efforts deserve nothing less than an A+.  But, due to a huge entanglement of reasons, including my gender, I have never received matching rewards, was forced to accept comparatively inadequate compensation and insufficient recognition.   

On the other hand, maybe my marks are always A+ because my undertakings are a tad below my true capacity.  What if there were no obstacles and I would have opportunities to embark on  Herculean tasks – the business pursuits of much larger magnitude?  How would I do then?  Would I still be able to impress?  How would I feel about myself and my results?

Maybe the real reason we both feel so shitty about ourselves lies in the betrayal of our true destinies (or, at least, what we think they should've been).  As a student, Mr. X was deeply affected by the brilliance of Marcel Marceau and was a part of a street-performing innovative circus troupe.  And all I wanted to do since I was 15 years old was to write cultural critique – absorb, decipher, and opine on various art forms.  Instead, both of us made a choice of going the practical route: killed the dreams and embarked on money-making pursuits (different amounts, same principle) in order to support our families.  In his new book Missing Out, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips argues that we care about the lives we failed to live more than the ones we actually endure.  Adam Phillips, dude, I feel ya!

Then again, let's say both Mr. X and I did have a chance to realize our wildest creative fantasies… but the only grades we could achieve were C's and D's.  Or what if we received A's from others for doing what we loved, but inside our neurotic heads still felt that we had not risen above F's?  What then?  

We don't know.  It's unlikely we ever will.  Meanwhile, here we are: two very different individuals with incomparable pasts, presents, and futures, but virtually in the same imaginary place – a dingy dinghy with a sad name Gloomy Fool. 

Job Search: Unemployment & Depression


At the end of February, The Ladders featured Debra Donston-Miller's article Depression is Making Unemployment Longer, which reiterated the well-known fact that unemployment walks hand in hand with depression and anxiety, and that, in turn, diminishes your ability to get employed. 

It's a vicious circle, you know.   A person looses his job – that's on its own is a hard blow to his ego.  Nevertheless, he gets right on all job boards – Monster, CareerBuilder, etc.  – posts his resume and applies to every single opening that matches his qualifications.  As time goes by, he keeps lowering his expectations – now applications go out to jobs with smaller titles and lower salaries.  Still, the response is not too hot.  

Nowadays, the statistical probability of converting applications into a recruiter's or hiring manager's interest is around 2% for high-level financial professionals – CFOs, Controllers, Financial Directors, etc.  The national numbers of people not being able to find employment in one, sometimes two, and more years are scary. 

While you are waiting for the sparks in the dark, your spirits get lower and lower.  You become listless, loose interest in everything – depression really kicks in.  The anxiety of not being able to support yourself when the savings and unemployment compensation run out gets overwhelming.  You swing between over-hype of appraising your possession for possible liquidation and inability to move a muscle.

Still, you force yourself to apply every day, you do your networking, ask people around.  Finally, quantity turns into quality: you've sent out 100 resumes and someone finally called you.   You've had a positive response after the phone interview and now you are going for a face-to-face appointment.  Anxiety floods you – the workspace environment, which you have not experienced for several months, seems so alien to you. 

You are prepared, though – you are a seasoned executive with superior qualifications, a likable person, well-spoken, know how to handle yourself.  The interview seems to go well, but there are so many candidates, and you might have said something wrong just because the depression and anxiety ate some of your confidence away.  Every day you wait for a call back, but nobody ever does; nobody even sends an email to let you know that you did not qualify – people don't do those sort of polite things anymore.

Now, you are loosing hope altogether: it is more and more difficult to make yourself even to look at the job listings.  It seems like staring at the television screen all day without seeing what's on is a better option…

You know what?  I am not going to tell you that it will get better.  I am not a fortune teller.  I don't know it, but neither do you.  Yes, it's fucking tough out there!  As I always say,  we live in a new economic reality.  The truth is that you may need to rethink your entire life.  But you cannot let the depression eating away your time.  FIGHT IT!  Do you know what happens with every single day you waste on giving in to nothingness? It disappears and you will never get it back. 

The Ladders' article quoted cognitive behavioral psychologist Deb Brown, who suggests creating a routine for yourself as one of the helpful tools.  My readers know how big I am on time-management and routines.  Whether you are fighting the unemployment depression or job frustration, scheduling your time and filling your day with meaningful tasks always helps.   And when you are unemployed, you have an opportunity to do things that you never had time for before: study Spanish with that Rosetta Stone pack you've got for your birthday two years ago; transfer all those home videos onto DVDs, get yourself fit.  

You don't really need more than two-three hours a day to look for new openings and apply.  Spend the rest of your free time (FREE TIME – when do we have it otherwise?) catching up on your life.  And don't be a prisoner of your schedule either – let go of it for a day, when you feel frustrated.

And listen, even if things with employment never get better and some drastic decisions will need to be made, at least you will not need to look back at the long stretch of a complete misery right before that.       

Back-to-Work Jitters


No matter how eager unemployed people are to find a job and get back into wage-earning trenches, when the fortune smiles at them and after months (sometimes years) of looking they finally secure a position, they cannot avoid feeling nervous, anxious, and frequently depressed. The same unpleasantly uneasy state of mind comes over people who return to the full-time employment or undertake a long-term engagement after the semi-freedom of short-project consulting. Even if you went on hiatus to write a book and put your entire life on hold to do so, now that it's over, you fear of returning to the regular job.

Moreover, much smaller gaps in working schedule have exactly the same effect on us. It's difficult to come back from vacations and even weekends. It is an established fact that the number of heart attacks peaks on Mondays in comparison to other days of the week. And it has nothing to do with Monday per se – if we moved the beginning of the week to Wednesday, the statistic would shift as well.

This is true not only for the hired schmucks like us, subordinate to their bosses' rule. One of my former multi-millionaire owners/CEOs confessed to me that he passionately hated Sunday nights (me too!), because Monday mornings loom over them. There was nobody over him. He had an attitude of a royalty, did what he wanted, and his scope of responsibilities was considerably smaller than mine. Who would've thought that he felt about the end of the weekend exactly the way I did. I am sure all my readers who worked in private companies have owners who take long weekends and hide in their vacation houses for the entire summers. Why do they avoid being in the office?

What does it say about our relationship with the activity that we let to occupy the largest chunk of our lives? Do we experience these sensations because we resent our jobs and are unhappy with our existence? Does it happen only with those who made sensible choices in their lives in order to support themselves and their families? I know it's not possible for the majority of people, but would we be more relaxed if we pursued our dreams?

Apparently not. All real writers are terrified of the empty page. Stanley Kubrick, of course, pushed the issue to its scariest interpretation by showing in "The Shining" how the fear of the typewriter with a clean sheet of paper in it can turn a writer into a psychopath. Famous movie directors, including Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Woody Allen, and Martin Scorcese, consider being on the set a pure torture. Pro-athletes are ridden with OCDs (endlessly bouncing the tennis balls, or tagging their jerseys in a particular way, or counting the number of times they knock on their locker) and many of them puke their guts out before every game or match. Speaking of puking, after 48 years on stage and screen, Cher still vomits before every performance.

The list of examples is endless. I believe, it's not about the work itself or the workplace. I think our psyche, taught by the previous experiences, tries to protects itself from frustrations and stresses associated with every job. The anxiety and the nervousness are manifestations of the defensive instinct: "Don't go. There will be pain again. You will be judged unfairly. You will care too much for your own good."

I honestly think that the workaholics among us work through their weekends and vacations out of self-preservation. They know that if you slip up, stop for a second and relax, it becomes incredibly difficult to go back. The human beings are addicted to doing-nothing and avoiding pain, but resolve to stay on the occupational wagon in order to provide for themselves, realize their self-worth, or satisfy their urge for creative expression.

Quote of the Day (House M.D.)


Images-1 Wilson to House:

" You don't like yourself, but you admire yourself.  That's all you got, so you cling to it.  Being miserable doesn't make you special, it just makes you miserable."