Jar jar

I must watch those Star Wars films again, it's been a while.

Mind you, there's a bunch of blurays that I've bought and not had chance to watch yet (cricket season dominates the telly) so it'll have to wait.

Today saw an Old Friend (actually two, one not so old) come back to work after far too long away. She's been struggling, which is highly understandable because a huge chunk of the foundation for her world has been kicked away.

Things happen to people. Really bad things. And quite often, we need a little help to recognise that it's not the end of the world. As long as we have some of that spark, there's a bit of help. And if we can't see that spark, someone we know will have a metaphorical match to help start it off again although it may not be obvious who that someone might be. There's always hope. Even if it's difficult to see it.

The closest I've come to losing hope is actually quite a few years ago (we won't talk about that) but it's been coming close again with the skin thing. It's tough that it's going one step forward, one step back, with the backward steps usually being my fault for losing discipline.

Relationships hit hard too, in the breaking of them. When my last major relationship broke up, I couldn't see it (and didn't want to show it) but I was utterly numb. I threw myself into the online gaming world and into work. I pursued two utterly doomed attempts at relationships and got incredibly frustrated when they didn't work out.

I was of course kidding myself that there was any chance - but the certain mindset at the time utterly ignored the impossibilities, both in the recognising that it was wasted effort and in the accepting of the inevitable failure. It just led me into a self destructive path which had me descend further into depression. Not entirely sure how I escaped from that - I can't remember.

Ok - that's it for my woes, for now at least.

I wanted to talk about a very special little lady who needs all the reminders she can get right now of how great she is.

I'm talking about the person who was the heart of my last team. She knew her little corner of the project perfectly, we could all trust that everything we sent their way would get done accurately and very timely. (And this is coming from a person who gives few chances and will bypass people when disappointed). It wasn't just the professional aspects though, it was the empathy, understanding and intelligence that kept people (everyone !) coming back for advice.

Yep. If there's one person who we could have happily kidnapped and brought with us when we shifted teams, it's this little lady.

Of course those awesome cakes help too.

So there we have it - we persuaded her to come visit my team today (I bribed her with jars !). She seemed a fragile 3 foot tall when she stepped on to our a floorplate and left an apparent 6 foot tall legend again.

One of the bad things about depression cycles is that it can lock away the ability to recognise the good things about yourself. That's when we need a little help from outside to recognise the value that we have. I hope we helped our little lady with that today, just like the cricket team helped me with it in the last game. I'll be back next year because of the lift they give me.

It helped me out as well today - my muscles have been complaining and it helps me to have a bit of mental fortitude to deal with that. Being able to talk through my issues properly is something I can't do with many people (what I put here is the tip of the iceberg). But being able to share the burden of issues that are actually quite similar help us both deal with them.

I'll leave it there :-)

Today was one of the better days.

PS I just checked - I have 8 more of those jars begging for some paint :-).