I shouldn’t have said “depressed”. I should have said “feeling depressed. I know the difference, given I have quite severe anxiety disorder, and this is not the same as “feeling anxious” I don’t have depression.
Anyway, I suppose it’s mostly just the regret and having absolutely nothing I can do about it. All my family knew from day one, and all still support me 100%. The only people I am hiding anything from is friends (who simply don’t need to know) and my job, who contractually don’t need to know either.
Baldy - see what Price said about what you do on probabtion. But note this, if you are a person (like me) who has never done anything wrong but the drink drive offence and no previous, there are more probabtion options open to you than if you have form for violence or drugs.
i would advise, on your probation induction, that you talk to them and request what you would prefer to do, and they will help you if they can. It really depends on what local companies have vacancies. They were going to put me at the recycling center (the dump) which would have meant humping rubbish all day in protective clothing (despite the hot weather) with a vest saying “Community Payback”. This would have meant hundreds of people a day seeing me. I stated I was trying to keep my job, and didn’t want the public feeding back to the employer what I was doing on weekends. So I did get the charity shop. The charity shop is not a soft option, if you are used to using your brain. For many weeks, it was just taking dirty clothes out of a bag, labelling it, and putting it on a hanger. For 8 hours solid. Not physically hard, but mentally it turns your brain to mush. As my 200 hours went on, I ended up doing pricing, steaming, shop work, computer stuff... and was simply trusted to get on with it by the last few weeks. You don’t wear the “Naughty Boy” vest in the back of a charity shop.
The bottom end of the CS, where you are not allocated an actual specific place, is showing up at the Probation Office at 0845 and hoping to get on the bus. The bus has a finite number of places, and will take you to destinations unknown... to paint walls, remove graffiti, cut grass, repair community centres, build fences, etc. (Again with the “Naughty Boy” flourescent jacked on) If the bus is full, you don’t get on, and you go back home with just 1 hour os CS credit. This bus will have the proper nutters on it. I have met some severely unpleasant people at the Probation Office... but all the staff and the other placements like me in the charity shop were absolutely lovely (apart from one, but I simply ignored her)
The other thing to bare in mind is to ask for a place that wants as many hours as you are prepared to give. My charity shop were desperate for help, so, even though I only *had* to do 8 hours a week (Saturday) I also did Sunday, and I also took a week off work as holiday, but worked charity during that time. That one week alone gave me 68 hours towards my 200. (That was, though, a physically and mentally 9 days from Saturday to following Sunday).
During my time on CS I have met a bunch of people who made excuses. People who were breached. People with 30 hours who took as long as me when I was doing 200. Your choice is to do the minimum, and have it take over your life for months, or to just bang it out and get it out of the way.