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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: K from Oxford (pt 2) kids etc
Date: 2003-11-03 03:21 am (UTC)<sigh>
Well, I'm pretty sure I've found him. He's just not in a position to raise kids with me at the moment. That may change... or it may not. I have no power to effect that change -- it's completely outside my control. Hell, a lot of the factors involved are outside his control. Which is one of the reasons I feel so hopeless at the moment.
Killing time is ...
But all that's not killing time! That's all contributing to raising a child, raising a person. Really -- none of that seems pointless to me.
I don't mind doing things which are pretty much pointless in and of themselves, so long as they're contributing to something that I believe to be worthwhile. I'd still get bored of from time to time, but I wouldn't feel like it was just a complete waste of everybody's time. I don't mind stacking shelves and lifting boxes at Oxfam. I don't mind making tea. I'm not looking for a job where everybody will admire me, or even a job which will stretch my intelligence (though that might be fun if I could find such a thing); I just want to do something that actually makes a difference.
And I still want, more than anything, to have kids. I think that's the most worthwhile thing I could do with the skills I have. But since I can't do that now, I want to do something that isn't totally worthless in the meantime.
It is no substitute for some kind of work and for getting out of the house.
But I don't care about doing "some kind of work". I don't care about getting out of the house. What's to go outside for if the most important things in my life are inside?
It is not a job for which society gives great rewards, nor does it do a lot for one's social self-esteem: the contrary, in fact.
I don't want great rewards. I don't aspire to Getting Paid Lots (though currently I could do with Getting Paid More, for practical purposes), I don't really want promotions, I don't even want "employee of the month". I've got boxes full of certificates and prizes, from Grade 1 ballet ("commended") to a BA in English (1st class), all of which have gained me nothing so far.
And I can't think of a better "reward" than seeing a child I've raised grow up to be a happy adult.
Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm naïve, but I honestly believe that I'd have a lot more "social self-esteem" as a mother -- it's a far, far more worthwhile role in my opinion than being (for example) Yet Another Java Programmer, or A Web Designer Writing Shiny Webpages Which Sell Things. Currently, I have no social self-esteem; I know how pointless all those jobs seem to me, but I also know I'm doing something even more pointless.
Having a child means you end up confronting and trying to throw out a lot of your own baggage so you don't pass it on to them. It doesn't go away by itself.
True, and it's one of the reasons that I'm still trying to sort everything out. But if half the baggage is due to not doing what I want to do, I'm not sure how I can get rid of it before doing what I want to do. IYSWIM.
Also, I don't believe anybody manages to become perfect, not-even-a-wee-bit-fucked-up human beings before (or after!) having kids. All the best parents I've ever known still have their own hangups, some of which they've passed on to their kids (they may not mean to, but they do...), some of which they haven't. And people develop plenty of new hangups connected with their kids. But by and large, they get by. And I suspect the people who know they have baggage to deal with are already in a better position than those who just blunder on regardless.
But I've never had kids, so what do I know, eh. :-/