Virtual Great North Run

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On Sunday I’ll be doing the Virtual Great North Run. Which is the great north run from the convenience of my house. So it’s not the great north run at all. It’s just a 13 mile run. I’d like to say I’m excited about it, but I’m not. I am really missing the slightly more competitive side of running and somehow I don’t think this virtual race will scratch that itch at all.

I downloaded the app for it yesterday, which enthused me even less. To be blunt, it reminds me of the kind of thing my last employer used to develop. You’d look at it and think “we’re not actually giving it to the customer looking like this, are we? Oh we are, okay then”. All I can say is I hope it works better than it looks, but in my experience, software often works exactly as well as it looks. So I’m not optimistic. I will be completely unsurprised if it crashes after 11 miles and doesn’t register me.

But then I’m not optimistic about the run in general. I don’t expect to get a good time because it’s just really, really hard to push yourself over 13 miles when you’re on your own. There’s no adrenaline or competition. There’s a reason that Kipchoge was surrounded by other runners during his sub two hour marathon, even though he had lasers projecting his desired pace onto the ground.

But apparently Parkrun is supposed to be returning at the end of October. I really hope so! The last time I ran a Parkrun was way back in March. The run director greeted us all with “GOOD MORNING PARKRUN” and when we weren’t loud enough for her she asked if we had some kind of respiratory illness. Well, ironically, I did, as I discovered the next morning when I woke up feeling like death and pretty much stayed in bed for the next week.

That was a long time ago now.

I miss Parkrun.

Disney

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The past two weekends I’ve been watching the Star Wars prequels. This weekend was Attack of the Clones. I never really liked the prequels much when they came out, but after seeing the most recent trilogy I appreciate them better. OK the acting’s a bit rubbish, but if you overlook that they’re not so bad. But also you see things through a different perspective as you get older. When you are younger you just see Anakin not behaving as a jedi should. When you are older you notice that the Jedi aren’t exactly setting him up for success. Maybe Kreia was right.

I thought I should watch them again because I’ve also been watching Clone Wars on Disney+. It was recommended to me a few years ago by someone I worked with. And actually it’s pretty good! The first few episodes are aimed at children but at some point they seem to change it to more young-adult and then slightly less young adult and it picks up quite a bit.

In related news, Disney is trying to get me to watch the new Mulan film for only £20! Well actually it’s £20 on top of the Disney+ subscription, which is £5.99/month. Who’s going to pay £20 to watch Mulan on TV? I hope I’m not out of touch on this. This seems like a ridiculous price to me and I hope this isn’t the future of film.

Life

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So apparently, as I found out today through checking out a referral on my WordPress statistics dashboard, I share the username I have for my blog here on WordPress with a cam girl on an adult site. I just thought I’d mention that. It looks like someone was looking for her but found me instead. I imagine they were disappointed. Unfortunately, dear readers, my clothes generally stay on while I am in front of my computer.

I haven’t written much here for a while because I’ve been kind of depressed. Well, up and down. Actually I felt fairly good over the weekend. I had a really bad day last Thursday, for reasons, but then the weekend was fine and it’s just today I feel down again. I think work got to me today. I feel… frustrated? But it’s not really any different than it has been.

I think I am now seeing the effects of Citalopram, in as much as things bother me a lot more than they did when I was on it. I definitely don’t feel as calm as I used to, and I miss that. There have been a few times that I have thought to myself that maybe I should go back onto it. But I’ve only been off it for a month, so I’ll give it a few months at least and see how things are.

Paranoia?

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I’ve felt quite stressed just lately and I think I’ve finally worked out why. In November I’ll have been at my current job for a year. A year is the milestone I’ve always had in my mind when I think I should be starting to look around and see if there’s anything better. At some point, someone will offer me £10k more to do the same job as I do now, assuming I actually put myself out there.

That’s all fine. I’m content with that.

What stresses me though is the thought of references from my previous job. When I left my previous job, my ex boss promised me a glowing reference. That’s already sounding alarm bells, because I came to form the opinion that anything he promised had a very low chance of happening. He also said he’d provide me with a copy that I could “keep on file”. Guess what: that didn’t happen. So, hmm. The thought that he could sabotage me with a bad reference is a bit disconcerting. I don’t really think he would, but I hardly left on good terms. I mean, I was polite about it, but I left because I thought he was useless and I’m pretty sure he picked up on that!

I looked up the law on references. References must be fair and accurate, which means that he couldn’t really give me a bad reference without opening up a legal avenue (which I absolutely would pursue). He couldn’t even safely write something truthful because I could argue it was unfairly selective and misleading. They actually use my work as the leading example of their abilities and achievements on their website, even now, almost a year since I left. He could hardly justify a bad reference.

So maybe I’m just being paranoid here, but I made sure the current website snapshot is saved in the Wayback Machine and I’ve downloaded a copy and put it on my Google Drive so it’s timestamped.

👍

This is how my mind is working at the moment. On the one hand I’m pragmatic and prepared and I’ll be grateful for it if I end up suing him, but on the other, I’m not sure a calmer mind would be exploring this eventuality.

I am trying harder to stop the spiralling thoughts. I’ve prepared, it’s fine, I can leave it at that. And breathe… I didn’t have to do this when I was on citalopram.

Oh yes, and the other thing is that if I am going to start doing a passive-ish job search again then I need to get back on LinkedIn. I deleted my profile a few months ago because I received a few unwanted messages from SOMEBODY from my previous job. I left my previous job because of bullying. My boss was useless in resolving it. That’s the summary. When I got this person contacting me on LinkedIn, it didn’t bother me much but I just deleted my profile because it wasn’t doing anything useful for me and it didn’t make sense to let it serve as a way for her to deliver messages to me. But I need to get back on there. I don’t really want to do that because… I don’t want to make myself able to be contacted by her, I suppose. I don’t want her knowing where I work. I know I can block her but she used two different accounts to send the messages. I can’t block accounts she hasn’t created yet.

It connects me virtually to somewhere I want to leave behind.

Tired

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I had trouble sleeping last night. I don’t know why, I just ended up lying in bed for an hour feeling my heart pounding. I was playing Factorio until 10PM which might not have helped… I used to have a strict “no computer games after 9PM” rule. But Factorio is addictive. Hmmmm…

So I’ve been tired today. The kind of tired that comes from not sleeping well. It’s been a long time since I felt like this. There have been a few issues with my sleep lately that take me back to about a year ago. Just before I started anti-depressants. One night last summer we had a thunderstorm at about midnight that went on for a few hours. I remember sitting on my bed at 2AM with a cup of tea and my guitar on my lap, because I’d pretty much given up on trying to sleep. A week or so ago we had a few nights with thunder around bed time and it reminded me of that night.

I don’t think I really had any problems with sleep after starting anti-depressants. I just slept. Now that I’ve come off them, I definitely miss that…

I can’t even blame last night on work stress because I have a few days off. I was a bit down the last time I wrote about work, and I don’t know if I genuinely feel that way. I don’t think it’s really bothering me at the moment. I think how I feel is that it was the right move at the time, but that doesn’t mean it’s right for me long term. And right now I’m OK with that.

Heat

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The heat has been a problem for me. When people in other countries hear people in the UK complaining about heat, what they usually don’t appreciate is that during summer time it’s rare to get heat without humidity. We turn from a cold, rainy island into a tropical rainforest island with near daily thunderstorms.

I’m glad it’s cooling down now. When it’s hot for more than a few days I seem to go into an altered state of consciousness as my sleep gets disrupted and all the days seem to blur into one.

I haven’t felt very good at all for the past week. I think it’s probably a mixture of the weather and doing too much running last week and over the weekend (overtraining). I hope it’s not that I’m no longer on antidepressants and this is me going back to “normal”, but the fact is that I’ve felt pretty depressed and emotional all week and they’d probably have helped.

Work has been frustrating me. I learnt today that the company has made someone redundant. This person had been furloughed, so it’s not a huge surprise I suppose (and it turns out he’d actually found another job and had been working somewhere else while claiming the furlough pay too, so it’s not like he’d have been back anyway), but, hmm, I don’t know. I’ve only been here for 9 months now and in that time two people have left (by which I mean they were pushed). That doesn’t fill me with confidence.

I don’t think my job is in danger, but then, how would I know? I am starting to feel the frustrations in dealing with my manager. I get bug reports from him which are a one-line email comprising a run on sentence that doesn’t really explain what he means. I never get any positive feedback. He is friendly enough with me, but the only feedback I get on my work is “this doesn’t work”. That’s a problem. But I don’t think it’s a problem with me.

Then there is the matter of the fact I was contractually promised a salary review after six months, and they still haven’t delivered on that. I’m just going to sit on that for now. I don’t think it is worth the risk of bringing it up yet, especially as since it’s in my contract I intend to and expect to be able to recoup it later, but it hardly makes for a good employer-employee relationship.

I wonder what my counsellor would say if I was still seeing her. I kind of know what she would say. She would say that they aren’t behaving as if they value the relationship and it’s up to me whether I want to act on that. Which I don’t, really. Not yet. It’s incredible to think I’ve been here for 9 months, though. That’s both a really long time and a really short time. There’s always the concern of looking like a job hopper, but I was in my previous job for seven years so moving on from this one after a year to 18 months is fine, really. I’m already half way through that period!

But there is also a good argument for going self employed. I thought about it a bit before I left my previous job but I wasn’t really ready. Now though… I still don’t feel ready, but I feel a lot less unready.

Running

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I’ve been running a lot again. Today I did another half marathon distance, because I got to 16k and thought “why not?”. My foot/neuroma has been behaving better, but after the long run this morning it’s been twinging a bit. Not badly, it’s just sometimes when I move my ankle around a lot I get a pin prick feeling in the ball of my foot.

It’s a bit frustrating because I don’t know how to treat it. I don’t want to stop running and I’ve always said that if it gets that bad then I need to get it treated properly. Okay… but actually right now I think that would be a bad idea, because I’m getting other discomfort around my ankle which probably means my biomechanics are a bit off and I should sort that out first. I don’t think that my hip strengthening did much. Well actually maybe it did, but nothing that helps my foot.

I still seem to have a lot of tightness in my inner ankle, which Dr Google tells me is my tibialis posterior muscle/tendon. This is responsible for foot stability during the gait cycle, it holds the arch strong and counteracts foot pronation, so if it’s not working properly, the foot flattens too much. Also, interestingly, this tendon actually connects to the metatarsal heads. Hello. Meaning that dysfunction here could be pulling the metatarsals out of alignment and potentially putting more pressure on the nerve? And not only that, but when I’m sat down and it tightens up, it could be pulling my metatarsals together and putting pressure on the nerve?! Maybe.

And indeed when it was twinging earlier, a bit of stretching of my ankle did seem to alleviate it.

It’s just frustrating to feel like you’re on the edge of injury though. I want to run tomorrow (just a few km slow) but it probably depends how it feels when I get up. Or I could have a lie in?

Withdrawn

~ e.v. ~ 2 Comments

So! It has been about a week and a half since my last Citalopram tablet and the withdrawal effects all seem to have gone away.

I feel the same but different. I was hoping to get rid of the dreams, but they still seem to be here. I feel generally more argumentative but that’s fine. Will I be as easy going with work? I’m not sure; I think I might have to pay more attention to how I’m feeling and try to nip anxious thoughts in the bud. But that’s OK.

The only other thing is sleep. I’m not finding it as easy to fall asleep at night. It used to be rare for me to still be awake by 10PM, but since I stopped taking the tablets I’ve been going to bed at the same time but I’ll still be awake by 10:30.

The only other other thing is my weight. In the almost a year I spent on Citalopram I gained about 5kg. This isn’t as much as it sounds, because I was pretty underweight to start with, and even with those extra kilograms my BMI is sitting just under 21. I am curious to see if I lose any of that, as SSRIS can cause weight gain. But what else can cause weight gain is eating a lot of chocolate buttons and croissants 🤔

Withdrawing #2

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Today has been weird. My stomach has been ok, but my head has felt very… Thick? I feel like I have bad allergies, but without all the sneezing.

I took no dose on Saturday, 5mg on Sunday then no dose again today. I’m hoping the dose yesterday will be the last…

Garmin is back (sort of) so I can see my heart rate stats. The 7 day average is 49, whereas the previous 7 days were 44. 🤔

Withdrawing…

~ e.v. ~ 5 Comments

So I have found that coming off Citalopram is actually much rougher than I expected. Reducing gradually over the last few months has been relatively uneventful, but going from a small dose to no dose has me feeling a bit unwell. Not very unwell. Just mildly unwell.

Well, I could be wrong. It could be unrelated. But my stomach isn’t happy (as if my stomach is ever happy), and my resting heart rate has jumped up quite a lot too. I would tell you the numbers but Garmin is still down so I can just see a badly labelled line graph on my watch. The line is going up. It was about 45, now it’s… 50? 52?

I started running again this weekend after taking a week off for my foot to settle. Yesterday I did 5k and I felt sick when I got back(!!!). 11k this morning which was a bit less horrible but my heart rate went up to 180, which is what I call the “I didn’t know it went that high” heart rate zone. Usually I have to really push to see it go past 160. After maintaining quite a high training load over the past few months and then having a week off I should be flying, but actually I feel like I’m a lot less fit than I was last week. So something is definitely wrong here.

Mentally I have felt all kinds of things. Short tempered, emotional, angry, less tolerant. All of those things. But nothing too intense so it hasn’t really manifested much outwardly other than with me being a bit irritable.