Huis Clos

[j4]

I just feel like there's no way out of where I am at the moment.

I don't want to work for ProQuest any more, it's driving me insane. So when all this positive freelance-ish stuff came up about work on websites and proofreading work, I told ProQuest I could only do a maximum of 2 days a week for them. Now I've heard nothing from either WaxInfo or 2i Publishing, and it'll be a week before I hear anything from the Police (and given the interview yesterday I don't hold out much hope for that one, and even if they liked me at interview they'll take one look at my sickness record and tell me to get lost). I suppose I'll have to carry on working at ProQuest for ever, but if I do that I'll just get more and more ill and useless.

I don't see how I'm ever going to get another job, though. Everything I might possibly want to do or be able to do seems to need me to give details of every single day I've been off sick in the past 2 years, and I've had too many days off to be employable. I don't know how I'm going to explain the mess I've made of getting jobs, either: "Well, I sort of went freelance, but then I just gradually stopped doing anything, and now I have no skills, no experience, no motivation, and nothing else to offer the world." I can't see a way out of it. I can't get a job, but the longer I don't get a job, the more unlikely it is that I ever will.

I also owe sion_a tens of thousands of pounds and I don't see how I'm ever going to be able to pay it back, because even if I do get a job I'm not likely to be earning more than £12k and that just isn't enough to pay the mortgage, pay him back and still afford to live. Semi-anonymous Katherine from Oxford was right -- I'm a useless sponger who should just move out, give sion_a his life back, and ... well, do whatever people do when they have no job and nowhere to live. I can more or less play the penny whistle, I guess.

I keep thinking, well, I could retrain; but how? The application form's going to ask (in one way or another) what I've done with my life so far, and the answer is going to be NOTHING, absolutely NOTHING. I've done ONE JOB, so badly that I'm now completely unemployable. And I've done nothing else of note with my spare time.

There's no jobs I really want to do anyway. I don't have a career, I don't want a career. I'd love to be able to have children and be a full-time mother, but I can't do that either. At this rate by the time I get to a stage where I can, relationship-wise -- if that ever happens -- I'll be too old and tired (if I'm even alive at all by then) to even consider it. And then there's the money. It's already likely to take me the rest of my life to pay off the debts I have; I'd have a choice between never having any money (which is not a great state in which to try to bring up children), or just sponging off someone else instead.

I'm less than useless to the world. I want to just lie down and go to sleep and never have to wake up again.

Comments

[j4.livejournal.com]

The part that wants to suggest they're being disoganised, and anyway you're underestimating your skillset, and encourage you to chase them up

They did seem pretty disorganised, and I will chase them up tomorrow. Honest.

the part that gets grumpily philosophical, to the tune of this being an immensely complicated world in which things to do with one's life can turn up in all manner of unexpected guises, as most lives I'm familiar with do eventually show,

Which is all true, but the very unexpectedness of the way those things turn up means that it's difficult to plan for them at all and/or to see any kind of future involving them. Or is that just me? Saying "something unexpected could happen eventually" seems, at least at the moment, to be akin to saying "well, I might win the lottery..." (though I don't buy tickets for the lottery, and fortunately one doesn't have to buy tickets in order for Life to happen to one).

and that money measures nothing other than itself and is a really bad metric for almost everything else

This is definitely true, but money does help with minor things like accommodation, food, and trying to have some kind of social life. And it's extremely hard to shrug philosophically about the meaninglessness of money when the debts just get bigger every month. (However I may feel about Mammon-worship, I suspect the HSBC value their money, and will resort to pointy sticks if necessary to reclaim it, which is not a thought that I exactly relish.)

[ cost is not the same thing as value;

"A cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing". Or words to that effect. (Wilde, I think. Probably.)

Google gives me no hits on "metric of eudemony", in the event that reading practical/philosophical/organisational stuff is a thing you find cheerful you want to look up Stafford Beer's Designing Freedom, which has sort of helped me deal with the universe when I'm in vaguely similar useless moods ]

Noted -- will look it up at some point, though at the moment my reading is a bit erratic as a result of very flaky concentration and tiredness etc.

and don't underestimate the value which other people may attach to your presence in their lives, because basically, if I like you, you don't really have the right to downgrade that judgement

Well, er. Yes, I can't argue with what you think of me, because it's your opinion, but I do reserve the right to be baffled sometimes as to what people see in me.

- and also that anyone who calls you a useless sponger isn't speaking with your best interests at heart and the validity of their opinion as a guide should be downgraded thereby

They didn't exactly say that, and I don't think that was what they meant to imply, though it certainly felt like that was what they were implying, at the time. (And it still does feel that way, to be honest, probably because it's poking a big pointy stick into all the guilt that I already feel anyway.)

and the part that just wants to curl up around you and hug you and offer to adopt you

I like that part. *hugs*