Tennis

What a difference a week makes. Seven days ago I was in the middle of a meltdown, rolling around on the floor of my apartment, swearing down the phone at some poor bloke in India who was just doing his job, and completely failing in my attempt to just do mine.

Having this time off work has made an enormous positive difference to my mood. Trying to cross items off my to-do list while working full-time was just too much for me. I’d lost sight of what I was even crossing them off for. Now I’ve booked the moving truck, my flat is on TradeMe (it got 600 views in the first 24 hours), and life is manageable once more. I’m breathing properly. I’m walking at my normal pace. I’m sleeping much better. And the Citalopram won’t even have kicked in yet.

Some people at work are clearly energised by being around all those other people. For me it’s all massively de-energising. Making a cup of tea or going to the loo inevitably involves bumping into people, almost literally, and I never know what if anything I’m supposed to say to them. The desk move, which resulted in me seeing those damn people much more often, de-energised me even further. And thanks to the restructure we now have meetings, which are peopley by their very nature, at four levels. Even when I worked at a large insurance company we got by with just three.

There have been plenty of stress factors in 2016 besides work of course. Taking on a flatmate wasn’t my cleverest move. He robbed me of my space, almost a week of sleep, and time to plan my trip and learn the language. Any thoughts of the future were put on hold for those four months; I was operating in pure survival mode. After he moved out we had the Brexit vote which cost me a good deal of money due to the sharp drop in the value of the pound, made me view my country of birth as a harsher, less welcoming place, and put my plans to live in Romania in some doubt. My form on the tennis court has slumped beyond belief, turning an enjoyable afternoon into a chore. It might seem a piffling thing but even having to ditch my car didn’t help me. The old Camry was a bit of a banger but at least it was mine. Having that sense of ownership is really important. Even though I own my apartment, I don’t feel I do.

I got called up to play tennis in a social (but actually reasonably serious) competition last night. As I’ve said before, if you really want to know my mental state at any particular time, put me on a tennis court. In recent months I’ve been flat-footed, dragging myself around the court, forcing myself to play the next point because I haven’t wanted to even be there. Not last night. I made few unforced errors, my concentration was massively improved and I was happy to get involved in long, tactical exchanges which I wouldn’t have had the patience for just a week ago. We won one match and lost one; I’m sure last week we’d have fallen to two heavy defeats. Best of all, I enjoyed it.

I met some friends (a couple) on Monday who I hadn’t seen since late last year. It was 4:30, so I’d normally have been at work. They were out playing Pokémon Go. I invited them in for a cup of tea and they told me how Pokémon had revolutionised their lives, especially hers: she’d had a meltdown that made mine seem like a mere blip on the charts, and has often struggled to venture beyond the four walls of her flat. The Pokémon Go craze has now spread to Romania. In English I hear people say they caught two Pokémon (not Pokémons) but in Romanian the noun is masculine and it has a plural: doi pokemoni. Most imported nouns tend to have the neuter gender, so who decided that pokemon should be masculine and have a plural in -i? It’s all a mystery.

Last week it all became unmanageable for me. On Wednesday night I was already struggling but picked myself up off the floor to call Barclays in the UK to get a debit card for an account I have over there. I got a female voice-recognition robot. I said “bank card” or something. Ms Robot said “all right then, credit card fraud” and that was obviously serious enough to warrant a real person. Mr Real Person, who from the way he spoke might as well have been a robot anyway, told me that one of my accounts had been cancelled due to inactivity and I’d need to go through a long and complicated process to retrieve the money. I’d have to send this pink form off to some address in Leicester, which he couldn’t pronounce. For whatever reason that sent me off the deep end. It took me a long time to calm down and I didn’t sleep well. This whole year has been a terrible one for sleep.

I nearly stayed at home on Thursday but figured I should keep things as normal as possible. I lasted about an hour at work. My carpool mate drove me home in my car. I was lucky enough to get an appointment with the doctor that afternoon, and I’m back on Citalopram again. That’s the SSRI I took for 7½ years (minus a short gap in the middle) after suffering panic attacks in 2001. The doctor also told me to take the next six days off work.

Wednesday night and Thursday morning had been coming for a while. It was an awful episode and I’m still recovering from it.

The highlight of Friday was dumping several thousand pages of actuarial notes in the recycling bin. I kept just one file for some sort of posterity. I also took some stuff to the tip. Yesterday I saw two friends, one in Petone and one here. They were both very supportive of me. Last night my friend from the tennis club came over. We played table tennis (though not actually a game; he would have thrashed me) and then tried to play squash. We’d hardly got going when I took a tumble and saw stars. I felt quite wobbly and disoriented, as if it wasn’t just the fall but everything else. We got dinner from the Basin Noodle House just before it closed, and chatted for a couple of hours. At 10:05 I looked at my watch and I realised I hadn’t checked the time for 90 minutes. Sometimes I go a whole night without managing that. He talked about his family in Singapore. His father, now a retired lawyer in his early eighties, sounds like a complete bastard.

Today I played bad tennis but won an award for my nine successive straight-set singles wins that now feel like ancient history. I’ve now got an engraved trophy, which is nice − I don’t get trophies every day, but I’ll only be able to keep it for a month. After that I popped over to my cousin’s place, and I’ve always enjoyed that.

After a really shitty week, I’ve managed to get exercise, sunshine and contact with people who I actually enjoy being in contact with. I could hardly have hoped for a better weekend and I’m now much calmer. I’ve now got a whole week to tackle my to-do list.

On Friday I went to the theatre at Bats, a Wellington institution that, to my shame, I hadn’t been to before. I never normally have anyone to go to the theatre with, and unlike the cinema, I wouldn’t go by myself. I saw Love and Information with the bloke from the tennis club and his brother who had come over from Singapore. The play was weird. It flitted between dozens of seemingly unrelated scenes with no discernible plot. I think the play was about the sheer quantity of information, some of it deadly serious, some of it less so, that gets thrown at us almost constantly in the digital age we live in. We can’t possibly take it all in. Each piece of information, each tweet, each Facebook message (I guess, I don’t do Facebook) has an implied “you’re supposed to care about this” tacked on to the end. But we can’t care about it all. The trick in the digital age is deciding, out of every ten pieces of information chucked at you, which seven or eight to ignore. The star of the show for me was an old guy who in some scenes had dementia, and at one point hilariously described online sex as “virtual and great”. In one scene somebody rattled off umpteen words for “table” in various languages and I was disappointed not to hear the Romanian word masă.

Yesterday I went on a walk around Island Bay with a Meetup group. It was a beautiful afternoon and we had great views including of the South Island. Wow, what a difference. A few weeks ago a walk like that would have been a serious struggle. Even walking up the stairs was an effort. It’s great to have my physical energy back. I noticed the difference again today on the tennis court. My play was still very scratchy and I still had problems on serve, but at least I could move to the ball. One of the women who ran the English teaching course in February was there.

Someone recently put me in contact with a Romanian woman, and I got to speak with her yesterday. She seemed very nice but wasn’t really able to help me, mainly because she’s been out of Romania for such a long time. I think she thought I was nuts. She certainly managed to sow a few seeds of doubt in my mind. Should I even be doing this? She said it would be daunting for me because I don’t know anyone over there. But I think of the alternative – team meetings, strategic goals, service level agreements, performance reviews, desk moves, restructures, playing the pretending-to-care game where the avoidance of bad outcomes is the best possible outcome – and daunting doesn’t begin to cover it. And if I only ever went to places where I knew people I’d hardly go anywhere. (The possibility of long-term isolation is something that concerns me, I’ll admit that.)

Last Thursday we had our latest body corp meeting about seismic strengthening. We didn’t make all that much headway. There are so many decisions to make – what percentage of new building standard to strengthen to, when to have the work done, whether to employ a project manager or facilitator, and how to apportion the costs. The fact that these decisions depend on each other to an extent makes it especially hard. On the matter of dividing up the costs, I was amazed at the number of people who wished this to be done equally between the apartments. “We’re about fairness and equity here.” So am I, but an equal allocation is surely unfair, inequitable, and plain wrong. Some of the upper-level apartments have almost twice the unit entitlement of my apartment and the others on the lower floors, which means they’re almost twice the size and are worth nearly twice as much. Nobody would seriously suggest that someone who owned two apartments should pay the same as someone who owned one, would they? Would you like to pay the same income tax as your boss? This reminds me of the Poll Tax in the UK in 1990. It led to riots and the downfall of Margaret Thatcher.

I haven’t seen any of the French Open because I haven’t found a stream that works. Muguruza’s win over Serena last night didn’t surprise me that much. People forget that Serena is in her mid-thirties, and Muguruza has looked the goods for a while. I predicted the Spaniard to win the title in an email to a friend when they were playing the third round, but unfortunately I forgot to place my $20,000 bet. There’s a lot riding on the men’s final. Djokovic is surely the favourite to complete his career grand slam but I certainly wouldn’t write Murray off.