Ennui (en-nui): A feeling of utter weariness and discontent resulting from satiety or lack of interest; boredom. Synonyms: listlessness, tedium, lassitude, languor.I can’t seem to shake it so I figured I might as well blog about it. Maybe it’s the times we are currently living in. The sad state of the economy seems to have most people walking on egg shells or feeling like a dark cloud is looming over their head, a perpetual Schleprock state of existence. Yet, no matter how much I try and outrun the cloud I can’t seem to lose it.
In the past five months I’ve watched the majority of our executive management at work leave, including my own boss and another close friend. Then another friend was let go a month after that. I’ve stopped counting how many people we’ve lost to lay-offs or those who jumped ship before the lay-offs occurred. I refer to my area of the office now as The Dead Zone with the sudden quiet of empty offices and missing podmates. We used to call our pod of four, The Fun Zone. It’s not so much fun any more.
Added to all of this was the stress created by months of waiting to find out if you were on the list of those getting axed, or if you were safe. It was like a bad version of Survivor where you didn’t know if you were going to be voted off the island or not. Then when you discovered your name did not have a pink slip attached to it there was the inevitable dichotomy of feeling relieved and guilty, because it meant someone else took the fall, likely someone you would have preferred to keep around. All of this was topped off with the news wage freezes were in effect for the year, putting the kibosh on the slim hope that maybe all your hard work from the previous year might result in at least a minimal increase to help offset the 6% cost of living increase. But no.
Worst of all is that somehow this has begun to bleed into my writing. Not so much my output, or what lands on the page, but the optimism I feel about my work eventually hitting the store shelves. With rejection after rejection coming in from agent queries, it is beginning to feel as if my feet are stuck firmly in the sludge with no hope of escape. I find myself more days then not staring into the future and no longer seeing or feeling a light at the end of the tunnel.
Normally, I’m a glass half-full kind of girl. I’m pretty good at keeping my spirits up and just ploughing through tough times. I rarely let anything stand in my way and if it does I find a way around it, through it, over or under it. I'm Solutions Girl. It's like a super power without a cape to go with it. But lately I find I'm running out of ideas where the writing is concerned and the bleakness that thought creates only seems to compound the original ennui.
My hope is that it’s just a temporary glitch. I’ll get back to my old rarin’ to go self in no time. Maybe the onset of Spring will improve my state of mind. In the interim, I will just hang in and chant under my breath, ‘this too shall pass…this too shall pass…’ And hopefully I will be right. I have to be. The alternative is far too unpretty otherwise.
But it hasn't all been bad news. I am going for a little puppy visitation this Friday. I found out I am getting a girl, though the right name still escapes me. I'll be sure and take plenty of pixs while I'm down there and post a few next week. In the meanwhile, here is one from the litter:
