Monday, September 10, 2012

Wah wah wah

//First off, apologies for the rambling nature of this. It's and unedited steaming shitpile of stream of consciousness self-pity, but I needed to get it out, because it was doing me no good at all in.

I'm familiar enough with depression to recognise the warning signs in myself. It's a terrible feeling to be looking at yourself and find nothing within you to be happy about. Certainly there are things to be satisfied with, but nothing I'm proud of. It's kind of a dark place. I wish I could say I'm surprised that I find myself in this place now, but I'm not. I get bad news and am disappointed, but not surprised. Good news surprises me. 

I have a good job, a wife and child that I love, I live in a nice suburb of a good city in a great country. It's really not that bad. But I am still angry at myself. I look at everything I've squandered over the years, dumb choices, laziness and fear holding me back. I want to say "NO MORE", but am enough of a realist to know it won't be that easy.

So I'm going to break down some of my issues and what I can do:

1) Weight/Fitness - this is pretty simple. Get back on the fucking wagon pal. Eat properly, do the exercise you want to and don't let excuses take over, you've used enough of them to recognise all of them by now.

2) Family - this is easy. I love them already. Reading bed time stories, playing trucks or dinosaurs or even just watching at the park, it's all great. And it helps that when there's an argument it's over the small petty stuff, hard to maintain anger over the way someone packs the dishwasher.

3) Work - this is the killer. When I went to university, I had no idea what I wanted to do, so I did a lot of nothing and a little bit of everything and came out the other side with a BA and an appreciation of a lot of different subjects. Since then it's been a succession of jobs with nothing to them - customer service and office management. And by "nothing to them" I mean that at the start and end of each day you've got nothing to show for your work except paper with a new stamp on it in a new pile. The job mightn't be rewarding, but it's reliable, it pays well and I have plenty of time for family. So I tolerate it and cherish the time I have with the people who make it worthwhile.

My wife encourages me to go back to university, but I don't even know where to start. I'm thirty years old and I still don't know what I want to do with my life. When I was in grade 4 I wrote about how I wanted to be an explorer, going to different planets, the deep sea, into the jungles - in search of lost cities and mythical beasts. Turns out there's not much call for explorers today - and even then, I doubt I'd ever find Mokele Mbembe now. I had wanted to join the Navy, but poor eyesight ended that, sadly the medical reviews for that ended late enough in the piece that I never really got a chance to think on what I wanted to do instead. So I started at University with no clear goal and no real motivation.

I cannot imagine staying in my current job for years more, let alone the decades that coworkers have. Hell, even remaining in the same business holds no appeal. It might be an outdated view, but today I couldn't stop thinking that I'll have nothing to show my son, let alone my grandchildren that I have done. I don't have a job where I can say: show them a building and say "I helped build that" or point to a story in a newspaper and say that I was somehow involved, or even wrote it. This isn't a world where I can build a house from scratch, I can't even renovate, I don't even have a garden to grow (and am a terrible gardener anyway - I didn't get that gene from my family). I'm left wanting a legacy that I know I will never have. It must be the historian in me who's obsessed with such things.

So here I am, browsing job listings, university admissions details and trying to figure out if going back to uni is really worth losing the income for four years and setting ourselves back even further. And even if I do go back - what the fuck do I want to do?