Happy Anniversary to me

So, folks, as of today (actually yesterday at about 9pm) I have officially been here for three months.

I knew I would hit a three-month wall, I knew it would be about the time the excitement wore off and the tiredness and the view of the very long road still before me would kick in.

There are lots of good things, really. I have already absorbed myself into this new place in lots of ways, and mentally I think I feel pretty grounded and positive.

But there is a wall, nonetheless, and I have kind of hit it, so this post will have some whining in it as well.

Good things - I am really soaring at work. I am so, so qualified for my job, and I do in fact have a great deal of passion for it. I can contribute so much to the company and those sites, I have all the qualifications and life experience to do it. It doesn't just take a book-knowledge of internet best practice, it's also taking my leadership skills, presentation skills, negotiation and persuasion skills, diplomacy (like last Friday when two of my suppliers were acting like three-year-olds, honestly, and I had to referee and calm everyone down). Editorial, budgeting, design, technology, communicating between people in about 20 different disciplines, keeping my eye on strategic matters and not getting bogged down in tactical, going around people while making them still feel like they have power. Working hard without burning myself out and still leaving room to build a life here, because at the moment I have no life. I can do all of it. I'm great at nearly all of it. It's a good feeling, and inspirational. So work, mostly, is a good thing.

The landscape. It still makes me sigh, even though sometimes I wake up in the morning and look out the window and gasp in confusion. Despite that it's really cold and hard to drive in, I love the snow. It snows and stays, for weeks and weeks, because it's so cold. It's really pretty, and stays pretty. It's hard to drive in, but I love it. And the barns! I love the barns. I want to get out in the countryside and drive around and soak up the landscape through my eyes, which I haven't had a chance to do because it's so cold and snowy. It's not like the state does not realise that its barns are wonderful. There is a barn on my license plate. There is a barn on my driver's license. But they make my heart warm, when I see them. Barns are another good thing.

The town. The town has a good feel to it. I was looking for Appleton postcards at a bookshop in town yesterday, and the photos are just ridiculously bad - a picture of Memorial Bridge which is just a picture of a road, with a beige 6-story building in the distance. I imagined sending it to someone and the mental picture it would create in them - a bleak, boring, featureless, semi-abandoned nowhere in the middle of the midwest. This town is not like that. This town is kind of unphotographable, because the main street is so long and the nice impression it makes is derived from driving down it as a totality. There is a set of etchings on display at both the library and the historical museum that depicts the whole main street one block at a time, and it is breathtaking and wonderful. It kind of captures the positive impression of the main street as a single photograph cannot.

I don't know anyone in the town yet, and I am in no way at all connected to my community, but it has a great feel. I get the feeling there is interestingness and people I will want to hang out with. Which is good, because I'm kind of committed to staying here for a while. My stuff isn't even here yet (oh God, how I dread that day, when I have to shop for my own furniture and spend weeks and weeks working out how to arrange things in my apartment). And it was so traumatic pulling up stakes and getting here that I couldn't go through it again in the short term. And I would lose so much time - it would be another three months in the new place before I was thinking of getting out and getting social, and hitting the wall of illness and depression, and having to write stern lists to force myself to do what needs to be done. I couldn't afford the backward step. So, here I am, committed to stay for a while.

But wait, Ellen, what was that you said about illness and depression? Yeah, I'm done with my cold but I think I'm in a state a doctor once called "post-viral". Friday night I feel asleep on the couch (watching bad stand-up on Comedy Central) and finally stirred and dragged myself to bed at 3am, where I slept like a dead thing until 11 the next morning, having dreams about work. Yesterday I went and got my hair cut and then tried to organise all the "shoulds" in my head by working out if I have any goals - someone had mentioned goals the week before, actually two different people, and I was struck by the thought that I don't have any. None. No reason to go on, nothing in particular I want or am working toward, still in this bleak post-apocalyptic limbo of my broken heart. And the broken heart was, actually also as of yesterday, two and a half years ago! I should be over it now. But I'm not. When I did my matrix of things to do, the winner was to come back home and spend time on the computer, but instead I came home and took a long nap and then stayed up until 2am watching a whole series of America's Next Top Model. Again. Having done exactly the same thing last weekend. I am wasting my life.

Today I'm trying, I'm really trying, but I can't move or motivate myself to do anything. I woke up and lay in bed with the radio on for an hour, listening to an NPR show on musical tastes that was talking about Celine Dion and the Roches, both of whom are not to my taste. I dragged myself out of bed thinking, "I should have something different for breakfast. Maybe eggs? Something special, because it's Sunday." And instead had exactly the same precise thing I have for breakfast every single fucking day. And ever since then I have been trying to get myself to stretch and go down to the little gym in the office building of the apartment complex. I got myself there last Sunday, I should do it again. But so far have not. Everything hurts - back, shoulders, hips. Everything is stiff. Every muscle is weak. Post-viral. But also toxins from stress, and also out-of-shapeness from not going to the little gym as much as I planned to. But I can't seem to get myself there. And my mind is in a fight between, "Of course not! You're post-viral! You're tired and achy! Rest, darling! Don't push yourself! You know you will be fit again, and full of energy, one day." And the other side, which is saying, "You know that the only cure for stress-induced depression is aerobic exercise. You can remember how amazing you felt when your trainer in Sydney used to push you beyond your limits. You didn't die, you didn't hurt yourself, and it was exhilarating and wonderful afterwards, and you were getting fit as an added benefit. You know the only thing that will cure your sore back and lack of energy, and low-grade post-viral depression, is to get out there and flog yourself on the treadmill. Don't whine, you know it's true. How do you expect to be a top performer at work without any energy or fitness? How do you expect to ever win a man, you 44-year-old over the hill dried up spinster, how do you expect to keep passing for early 30's and fool them into sleeping with you, unless you go to the gym, right now, and at least three times a week, which you have not done?"

It's not working, as you can see, dear readers, the scoldy voice in my head. I'm here instead writing all this down. On my anniversary - of both arriving in Apple Town, to start my new life, and of my baby done leaving me, to end my old life.