Depression: Painful part of fight

(Image by Stock.xchng vi)

I last wrote about working through change and how I’m learning new lessons about time and patience.

Change is messy and can be painful. One result of that pain can be depression, a curse I think almost everyone faces from time to time, especially during loss or struggle. But for those who become discouraged during a prolonged effort or who are prone to focus on their own shortcomings, it can last a lifetime.

So it has been with me.

New lessons on time, patience

It is amazing the things you learn when change happens.

When I was laid off in December, I could recall only a few times in my life where I had felt hurt more badly. Some involved deaths, others betrayal, still others, rejection.

But change does happen, and when in January I started working as a reporter for BocaJump.com, after having spent 20 years as an editor, I had to relearn the reporter’s frustrations – particularly, those related to phone calls. There is waiting for someone to call back, enduring those who do not, playing phone tag with still others who are in and out while you also are out and about.

Can't turn a blind eye to this

If you have ever heard the expression, “turn a blind eye to …,” then perhaps you are familiar with its meaning, which several online dictionaries define as deliberately disobeying or ignoring unpopular orders.

The idiom has its roots in a rather humorous incident, if the United Kingdom-based website The Phrase Finder is correct. It attributes the expression to Admiral Horatio Nelson, the British Navy legend who was blind in one eye.

More work, still underemployed

What a difference a weekend and a couple of Gmail filters can make.

The last week marked the second of my transition off the government’s unemployment rolls after taking a contract job as copy editor with Patch.com, a network of hyper-local news websites in smaller communities around the nation. It’s been described as AOL’s attempt to return local news to smaller communities (see Patch’s About Us page).

This is a wonderful opportunity, although I remain woefully underemployed.

“The times they are a-changin’ ”

It’s not news – Bob Dylan wrote in the early 1960s that “The times they are a changin’.”

I got my start in community journalism in late 1983, the same year the woman who I would marry about nine months later first smiled at me and stole my heart from across a typesetting machine in the newsroom of a small newspaper, the Rawlins Daily Times in south-central Wyoming.

Up another rung reaching for the sun

It’s been a busy, busy week, and it’s been one that’s tiring as well – not because of sleepless nights wondering about the next job.

Mostly, it’s been because I’ve been working yet another job, albeit still on a part-time basis. But the busy-ness feels good.

In addition to working up to 15 hours a week as a digital journalist – a reporter, mainly – for Elgin’s hyperlocal website, BocaJump.com, this week I began copy editing again for 12 Patch.com sites in the northwest suburbs.