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j4I 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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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.
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Re: Katherine from Oxford again (pt 1)
Date: 2003-11-03 02:38 am (UTC)It's more "then why can't I get a job?". I know I'd feel a lot happier immediately if I was doing something that wasn't so soul-destroying.
but you are too intelligent to decide that the only possible change has to be for the worst
It's not that the only possible change has to be for the worst, but any change that I'm actually capable of making at the moment seems to be for the worse, or at the very least for the no-better.
Limit yourself to beating yourself up three times a day, preferably between meals, for a specific amount of time, then get up and take the cat for a walk [...]
<smile> This is good advice. I will try, really I will. (Wish I had a cat...)
[friends]
They carry you, you carry them, you rub along, and suddenly it's 20 years later.
But that's what I'm scared of -- that I'll just potter along having the same conversations with the same people in the same pub and suddenly I'll wake up and realise I've wasted 20 years of my life! I mean, I do want to talk to my friends -- obviously, or they wouldn't be my friends -- but I hope there's more to life than just sitting around talking about nothing in particular. I think I'd be a better friend if I felt I wasn't just killing time.
Geeks are often such restful people: so rest.
Um, I think we have a different perception of "geeks". Or of "restful".
[revising CVs]
I was looking at a "make your CV shiny" website last night, and the example CV it gave was freaky. Every single thing they'd ever done -- the essays they wrote during their degree, the modules they took, etc.; and music grades (for heaven's sake, does any potential employer really give a shit about piano grades that I did when I was 13?). I've always been told only to include what's actually relevant, and while I could make a case for my Grade 3 Flute being a great achievement, I can't honestly imagine an employer being interested...
The other thing about CVs is, I'm getting (some) interviews -- and the CV is only really useful for getting interviews, isn't it? Nobody cares about my CV once I'm in the interview room stumbling over difficult questions like "What's your name?".
You took a year out to get some perspective on the hothouse,
Will people see that as a valid excuse? I certainly don't want to have to mention that it was because of d*pr*ss**n if I can avoid it, because that's an instant "DON'T EMPLOY THIS PERSON!" warning bell...
[Belbin etc.]
You have probably done a Myers-Briggs already,
Nope.
For 25 quid you can buy a few rounds of beer, or get yourself some potentially useful information:
I'm worried that for £25 what I'll get is a different indication of how useless I am! I'm also not convinced the sort of people I'm applying to will ever have heard of these Belbin tests -- you're the first person I've ever heard mention them. And while I've heard of Myers-Briggs tests, I've never seen anybody include the results on their CV...
[training day]
[...] how DO you actually budget like a grown-up, [...] --- all mysterious stuff to those of us from an academic background).
Most of the people I know from academentia already budget like grown-ups. They know exactly how much they earn, how much they can afford to spend in a month, how much their shares are worth, how best to invest any windfalls, etc., and (most annoying of all) they don't appear to have had to learn all this -- they claim it's "obvious".
Call up those guys who muttered about free-lancing and find a use for you.
I did -- one said "Hmmm, oh, yes, well, we're waiting for a guy called Steve to do some more technical stuff, and, er, until then there's not much point in you doing anything on the website..."; the other said "No, er, no, nothing at the moment... oh, dear, if I'd thought I could have given you some work at the time when I spoke to you, but ... hmmm, too late now, sorry". (Gah.)