The winter blues....

Well it's hit me once again... the post-holiday depression.

The lights in the neighborhood are coming down... radio stations have long since stopped playing Christmas music...Christmas trees are lying discarded on the curbside... ours is still up, but I think there may be more pine needles on the floor than on the tree. It's January, and somehow this is the time when winter seems longest. Rachel's back in school.. Lauren's back at work... and I'm back to only having the cats to talk to while I spend what feels like an eternity job hunting on the computer.

I am officially down in the dumps.

Maybe it's the typical holiday let down. Maybe it's all the worries and stresses I pushed away during the holidays crashing back in all at once. Maybe it's missing Emily. Maybe it's simple lonlieness. Maybe it's a combination of all of the above.

And it's hard to even try and explain it to someone. How can you expect words that will help when you can't even articulate what exactly it is you want help with? I'm even having trouble finding the right words to even try and pray about it.

I suppose my biggest worry is finding a job. It was easy to not dwell on it with all the holiday hoopla. But now that it's over, the worry is back. I honestly didn't expect it would take this long to find a job. I suppose I naively assumed that it would all turn out exactly as I imagined, that I'd find the perfect job, discover what exactly it is I want to be when I grow up, and life would just march happily along. Well it's been almost six months since I was laid off, almost three months since I moved, and here I still sit. Perhaps God's trying to teach me patience. I think I'm failing miserably at patience and I'm getting an ulcer from worrying instead.

And now I'm stuck trying to find a way to even end this post. Phrases like "something will turn up soon", or "the right job is out there" and things like that are running through my mind. But they don't really help. Not when you're in this kind of mind set.

So I think instead I am done with the computer for today. I shall toss my "lose 10 pounds" resolution right out of the window and break into the stash of Christmas cookies and curl up with one of my new books.

Perhaps things will look better tomorrow.