I've been having some really interesting meetings lately over a number of different projects. They've been in a number if different areas to do with education, educational technology and peripheral applications of technology in education. It has, to say the least, been exactly what I needed.
Over the last few months I've been struggling with depression. For me this tends to manifest as apathy for everything, procrastination in study and work and a sort of low level constant irritability. To sum it up I become a grouchy git who just doesn't feel effective. This leads me to not try my hand at anything or get things done which makes me feel even more ineffective and so on. You can see how this goes.
Over the last few days I've been asked to: give my opinion on things I care about, produce a workshop for a conference on a project I'm involved in developing, observe a highly exciting data analytics for education project and just generally had a lot of external validation on the professional and academic front.
For the first time in a while I don't feel like a fraud. I don't feel like a stupid kid holding up the puppet of my adult self. I feel like I'm a little closer to being that which I strive to be professionally. I also realise that I'm not stuck. Something I was feeling for a while, like spinning my wheels, no forward momentum.
It's been said that you have to work through your uninspired periods, that if you only work when inspired nothing gets done. When I'm depressed I need a little inspiration to pull myself into working. Today I got that excited buzz of inspiration which along with recent validation makes me want to get working again. To build the habit of working again and push myself out of this doldrum I found myself in for the last 5 months.
Today I'm a step closer to realising the me I feel I should be in a professional sense.
