I am a negative person

I heard someone say this in AA after I had been sober about three months. I didn't get what she meant. She sounded to me like a reasonably optimistic person.

Anyway, after I had moved, and then moved on into the world of secular sobriety, a couple of years later, I thought again about her comments and took them as just some version of AA-speak, or part of AA's hair shirt.

However, in the last week, I've revisited that comment in my mind. Several factors have led to that.

First, although I still have gainful employment and keep body knit together, etc., the employment world has not been kind over the last five years.

It was nearly five years ago that I first got the real impression that my then-newspaper employer could go under. When some pundits were saying what eventually would be called The Great Recession was worse than the Carter-Reagan recession, I said no it's not. Technically, I was right at the moment. In reality, it did indeed turn out worse in the longer run.

My newspaper company eventually did go belly-up in July 2009, after months of struggles, along with public denials on my part as well as our owner and publisher. (Turns out, in the particular Dallas suburb where we were officed, rumors of our demise, and specific financial problems, had been running around for a few months before that.)

I was worried ... mid-40s, economy not good, newspaper industry in the tank in general, and the Dallas Morning News and Fort Worth Star-Telegram having already canned a number of people. Maybe, in part due to having anxiety issues bad enough two years earlier that I went on anti-depressants, I was worried that something similar would arise again.

So, when I landed a job as a copy editor in Odessa, I knew I would take it. Then, they found out I had blogged about the demise of my suburban Dallas papers, and the attempt to do a start-up to replace it, and how I mentioned some financials as part of that blog post. Top two editors at Odessa grilled me about that, and I did an honest tap dance and kept the job.

Then, I feel depressed driving from Dallas, especially when I get past Sweetwater and descend into the Permian Basin. And it gets worse.

I get to Odessa the day the Odessa American's parent, Freedom Communications, declares Chapter 11. Yes, sobriety friends tell me that's not necessarily the end of the world. But, I can't be sure of that. Add in an assistant news editor who could ride roughshod over people at times, and did, and ... it was very bumpy my first six months there.

Then, the latest oil boom is making rental prices skyrocket, so I look to get out. And do, soon enough.

To Marble Falls, a Texas Hill Country town an hour west of Austin.

More fun ensues. My boss text messages me on the day I arrive, treating me like I'm 21 and texting me about proper dress code. Things went generally downhill from there.

And, I got out, with a bit of a pay cut, to a small weekly. Then, I advance to become publisher of the larger weekly in the same county the parent company owns, along with that one. I do well on the editorial side, while learning the ropes on the financial side. That includes having some slow times on the financial side, making a mistake or two on decisions, and having people now breathing down my neck.

And, still being unable to land a job outside the newspaper industry, or a better job within, and determined not to jump again from frying pan to fire.

Negative as in seeing darkness in my economic future? Absolutely. Negative in letting some of that, at least, spill into the rest of my life? Certainly.

I'll likely be negative for most of the next decade, until I'm within the last decade of the Social Security "finish line," assuming our political leaders don't shift the goalposts on that again, as far as retirement age.

And, this is why I can't stand New Ageism's brightsidedness, nor Christian success gospel talk either. And, some of us have temperamental leanings by genetics, reinforced by early, middle, or late life experiences, to see life non-optimistically at times.

I hope I can just be "reasonably negative," rather than fully so.