... · 2:42am May 15th
I should have written this a long time ago. It's been embarrassing. I've been embarrassed. I've also felt like, hey, I'm washed-up and haven't written anything in ages, so why should folks care?
But I might as well be honest, because if not now, when?
I lost my job.
and I don't mean "I lost my job just now," I mean "I lost my job over six months ago and i've been unable to find more work."
And that's no, and every, excuse for having not written anything.
It's not like the job search is all-consuming, after all. I have a linkedin account, I have indeed.com, I have my finger on the pulse of the local and state government and seeing what the various government departments post up; it's weird to say "I want to work for the government" as a dream job, but more than anything else I want security, where i can work remotely and not have to worry about when a fresh reorganization is going to shovel me out onto the proverbial sidewalk again.
I should probably mention why I lost my job: My boss decided that she was going to retire. Said boss is the head of the group i worked for, which was a bunch of contractors in various fields, mostly IT ones. She was the chief networker, among other things, because she has charisma out the ass and could convince her enemies to walk with her into hell within half an hour, or twenty minutes over dinner. She left, the group dissolved, bye bye. At least i got a cover letter out of it.
And I sort of figured that, insofar as leaving work goes, i've had worse. I got fired from one job for "mouthing off" once, by asking a receptionist if i knew where i could get disposable gloves without leaving the premises of the lab because i was working with hazardous materials and didn't want to work with my bare hands (There's a long story behind that job, which i won't go into now because it's a distraction, but tl;dr every non-intern there should be looking at legal action for various gross violations of OSHA and other laws). I also got suspended from a job for three months, then let go of at the end of that period, for having the audacity to have a seizure at work (despite letting HR and my supervisor know that i was changing medication around the time that happened and that something like that might happen at work, which they assured me they'd take under consideration). The only places where I've left in a way that wouldn't look crap on a resume were various retail positions, and the only place where a boss specifically wrote me a glowing recommendation was a cashier at McDonalds (and that's yet another story.)
I'm digressing a lot here, and also passing the buck and possibly trying to shift blame on things that ultimately come from me. Underlying conclusion, though: I thought my current job was safe, or that after it ended my workplace experience, outstanding materials and endorsements from various different networked individuals that I'd be able to find a job before the topic came up at Thanksgiving.
I did not. And then i failed to keep it from coming up at Christmas.
And then i just kept failing, and failing, and failing. And I'm continuing to fail even now.
And perhaps this is a white boy's white boy problems, but I've felt few things in the world more humiliating than applying for work i look good enough to be hired for, only to be told that I'm not anywhere near what they're looking for, over and over and over and over and over. Because other forms of social rejection, you can just chalk up to someone's personal grievances, right? But this is as official gets: paper statements reading "you're not good enough," even for jobs offering little better than minimum wage.
I've said, perhaps blithely, to other people that this sort of thing makes me want to kill myself; not in an overwhelming rush of despair or a desperate fumbling around for a way out, but more like a dull, throbbing toothache. I wake up in the mornings, knowing that I'm not good enough to start working. My sleep schedule periodically falls to shambles until i fix it with melatonin, and i can't find the energy to care when i can't think of anything i might be beholden to. Most days I don't bother to get out of pajamas, because if I'm not going to be seeing anyone or doing anything, why bother? And so it goes.
I had every opportunity to live well, and I blew it. High school, scholarships, college at a good university...you get through all of that and you assume that said pedigree guarantees that you'll at least land stable employment as a reward for your hard work. And then it doesn't, and you constantly hear stories about people who pulled themselves up from the slums into six-figure jobs and other folks running companies and making more money than it's possible to realistically conceive of actually spending in one lifetime, and you sit there with no job and no easy prospects and feel like you might as well have not accomplished anything in the first 20+ years of your life for all the good its done, until you remember that other people have done it, with less, and accomplished more. Not because they were better, but because you were worse. Not good enough to amount to even baseline standards.
If i don't spend all day either perusing job listings or otherwise distracting myself, i remind myself of that fact. And then i remind myself that i could just fall out of my apartment window one day, and the world would lose nothing of value. It'd gain something of value, actually, not having another resource hog consuming food and energy and everything else with a life lived without accomplishment.
Eventually my savings will run out, and I'll be really fucked. I'm trying not to think about that fact. It gets harder every day.
"But Petri," I can hear people saying. "At least you have time to write now, right?"
I do. And I should be able to. And then i look at old, barely-started word documents, and i remember exactly how all those plots and stories go, having memorized them in my head already and knowing that all i need to do is transcribe them onto paper, and having all the time in the world to fill them out.
And I don't.
I can't quite put a finger on why. Is it because I'm "depressed?" Is it because everyone else I know has moved on? Is it because the only groups i can think of that write on a scheduled basis are all competitive, and every contest failure feels like yet another form of rejection? I don't think it's as simple as any of those, but I don't know what else it might be. Something ineffable.
I don't know how to feel about a lot of things anymore, but at least I know to feel embarrassed about my lack of productivity. Humiliated, really. I have no excuse.
Just like I have no excuse for not having a job.
Maybe this is what giving up feels like? like, in a general sense, having "given up" on things. Feeling hopeless, and apathetic for the hopelessness, even if you don't really not want to do things anymore. I don't hate fanfiction, and I don't want to give it up, but that ultimately doesn't mean anything if I never get around to writing anything, right? Just like feeling like it doesn't matter if you want to feel like a productive member of society but your standards are so stringent that you can't.
(My standards: remote work. broad label "office work" outside of coding. $30,000+/year. I want to believe that's not too much. Maybe it is. I think it probably is. At this point, it has to be.)
(What was over half a decade's worth of work if I can't even dictate that much?)
(I don't know.)
I want to write, but I can't.
I want to be productive, but I'm not.
I don't want to be objectively, officially, verifiably worthless.
I am.
And I wake up every day and live with that.
I miss having a job. I miss feeling qualified.
And I miss all the people I used to talk to here, in their different groups and with their different reviews and their different stories, who made me feel like I could accomplish things and was worth things and made me want to create more. And I hate that they'll probably never read this, or reach out to me about it, because even if they saw it why would they think it was specifically about them?
Why was I so good at burning bridges and walking away from things I never really wanted to walk away from?
Why did everyone leave me?
How can I feel so lonely when I'm the one that hid from people in the first place?
Why are the only things I can post these days idle rants of narcissistic self-pity and whiny self-indulgence?
Why is it that whenever someone announces that they're washing their hands of ponies and moving on, it feels like a rejection letter to me?
And why does it feel like if I could make them more passionate and engaged with it, they might not have broken so hard nor felt so disgusted about their time here, and that it's my fault for not making them like things here more?
Why can't I mean enough to employers for them to want to hire me, or mean enough to people to keep them from leaving my hobbies?
I feel so hopeless even when I'm surrounded by opportunities and alone even when surrounded by people.
And if nothing else, why can't I at least write without feeling like a failure about it?
And why am I so scared to see the fallout of my post from this, such that the only way i'm able to post it at all is after plenty of jack daniels and silence?
I don't know whether the silence or the tacit rejections of pony would feel worse, but I guess I'm going to find out.
Misery is a well that deepens the longer it exists. But there's always a bucket that can lift you out. As a casual fan of your work; I don't think any less of you for your predicament. And I hope a few kind words from a stranger can help ease the weight on your shoulders if even a little.
I don't know what to say, but I hope it gets better. I hope your job hunt goes well, and I hope that someday soon you'll be able to recapture the joy you felt with writing.
I know we don't know each other well but my DMs are open if you need to vent at all. I'll listen.
Such conditions and emotions is a self-destructive slippery slope that any person can befell to. It might seem bad, but it's not really -- as in, things always can get worse.
What I think you might need is a fresh look at yourself. Get out and pick up some new activity, challenge yourself with a new experience. Live in today, not in the past. It is a tough balancing act, but things that are worth doing are never easy
I sympathize a little with struggling to make the stupid, emotional part of your brain feel good when you're doing good. Not as bad as you do, I guess: It's been a few years since I was last suicidal. I got out of it because I could drop out of college, live with my parents, and do janitorial work for minimum wage for a couple years.
It's possible to learn to be more satisfied with what you have, but you have to believe you can change the way you think. Make your goals be time commitments instead of something concrete: Don't say you'll write a short story, say you'll spend 30 minutes writing. And if you spend 30 minutes staring blankly at a word document, that's a success. That's all you need to do for the day. Be sincere; don't try to keep working after the deadline. Commit to taking breaks. Use a timer. Committing to 30 minutes a day is easier than six hours once a week. I can't advise you on how to deal with the hard deadline of running out of money; I didn't have that problem at the time.
Idk. It worked for me, but maybe you have the kind of depression that's only treatable with pills.
Regarding people moving on from pony... I'm sorry. I hope whoever you're listening for responds. If they don't, I don't know how to get over that, because I haven't gotten over that myself.
That's a genuine accomplishment, imho. Not everyone can make that work.
I think it's interesting how employers that are bad can sometimes leave some employees convinced that the fault is simply in the employee, or that the fault will always be seen in the employee.
'I (or 'You') don't even
deservehave the right to have problems, and if I have a serious problem that just proves that I am a bad person,' is a falsehood, a cruel falsehood, and one that gets peddled around a lot.I seldom talk about the number of horsewords contests where I've won or placed. But I'll tell you, I did it by losing (a lot?) more than I placed in. Entering contests with the expectation that I SHOULD win most or many of them would be, imho, the true losing strategy.
Anyway, I'm sorry I don't know how to do more to help you get out of this more quickly, than to try to tell you that you aren't a failure and please don't be unreasonably harsh on yourself.
(Italicized text is edit/s made in the first ten minutes after posting.)
It's difficult to impossible to get into a constructive creative mindset with so much weighing on you, including an overwhelming awareness of that weight. That's not a personal failing, nor is other people deciding to leave the fandom. I too have had the "Maybe one more fic might have gotten them to stay" thought, but at the end of the day, it's their decision and has no bearing on your quality as an author or person.
And empty as it sounds, I do wish you the best of luck on the job hunt.
I haven't started job hunting yet, and I figure I should probably start sooner than later (not before next month though c_c)
Just remember, whenever anyone complains that "no one wants to work anymore!" what they actually mean is "we don't feel like hiring people for what they're worth". And you are worth more than society has convinced you. Don't be hard on yourself, and don't give up.
I relate a lot to this. Like, probably more than you would think.
My only advice, which is the same advice I'm giving to myself at the moment, would be to remember that you have inherent worth and value as a living human being no matter what you do. This is regardless of the amount of good you can visibly see yourself giving back to the world. Just trust that. Heck, this blog post is valuable. Any comment, word or phrase you share with another person, however infrequent that might be, is worth something and it's worth sticking around for. And that's only an example. Your simple presence in this world matters.
Try to enjoy life for life's sake.
That said, I do wish you the best of luck in finding a job that is fulfilling to you. You're not alone. I'll be trying to do the exact same.
In a move that may make you want to punch me, I want to go out on a limb and suggest exploring exactly how this makes you feel, in much the same way you've already done above. I know it feels like cold comfort now, but this sort of emotional energy is irreplaceable when it comes to feeding your sense memory.
On practical matters, I don't know if I can help you find a job, as I've been out of the interview game for a long time, working in government. The bureaucracy around here always seems to need number shufflers.
Hang on. You're not valueless. People care that you exist.
I wish you the best of luck, and I hope things get better.