Personal Journal

Sisyphus

Today it is Kaiser-Permanente who has me fit to jump off the Royal Gorge bridge.

I applied for a communications coordinator position, and the only thing I found questionable about my match to the requirements was a background in how health care reform will affect the insurance industry. So I name-dropped my friend who is director of the Colorado Consumer Healthcare Initiative as someone who could speak to my political awareness and writing ability.

And it mattered not.

Yesterday I was stressed to the point that I actually vented a bunch of texts to my friend Cindy about how, if I die between now and May, the thing I will most regret is going to graduate school. Which is true today. I am imprisoned in this hell of hopelessness that seems to grow and expand as I contemplate the notion that even an MBA degree is not going to help me gain new employment. In that scenario, I end up with $30K of loans that I need to repay, and a job that I'll be laid off from in Fall 2011 (six months after I graduate).

I have a job, for which I'm marginally thankful because I don't have to suffer financially right now, but I have to admit I'm suffering. I'm suffering from unchallenging work. I'm suffering from the sacrifices needed to go to school by night and do this job by day, and the 10 hours a week I spend commuting just to work, followed by another 4 or so to school and back.

I'm frustrated by not knowing what is wrong with me, and when that combines with my propensity to be self-loathing, all I can really tell you is that in any given moment of time, I can literally feel the weight of failure being laid on my by a universe that, I'm disappointed to say, has no malice toward me whatsoever. If only it did, then at least I could stand defiantly against it, knowing that what is a consolation-prize 'victory' of survival is at least evidence of my own competency at something. But no - these rejections, they have nothing to do with my specifically. I am an androgenous ananymity to the universe at large, even to the wheels of the free market, industrial machine. I deserve credit for nothing. I am a Loser, only with a lower-case "L".

Yesterday I was at my wit's end, and I vented to Cindy, and she did me the kindness of calling me directly to talk me back off the ledge. My misery has an expiration date, she said. Meaning that when I graduate, a lot of my misery ends. Which is true - that will give me time back which I desperately want, and mental space. But graduate school was a desperate attempt to meet a certain end: to gain challenging work that I could enjoy, that might pay me the same or maybe more. Right now I am completely unconvinced that having an MBA degree is going to make me any more desirable to a future employer. It doesn't affect my present employer at all - they're unimpressed. The fact that I'm 75 percent done with the said degree doesn't seem to move anyone at all either.

Yesterday I don't know how many times my inner-mind's motion picture generator flashed across some variation of the them "death would be more peaceful than this". Death is not something I'm contemplating, but a means to inner peace would sure be welcome. And I'm not able to find any peace. I need out of this job desperately - I realized yesterday it's having a deleterious effect on my health. I need the time back, and if I had it I would use it to ride my bike more (which seems to be the only sure-fire way I have to get myself to like me).

I am desperate, which is no way to live. It's consuming. It's an imprisoning obsession.

Everyone says someday it will happen, but I'm not seeing any reason that this myth is true. In any event, every day I play Sisyphus, or is it perhaps Prometheus. No, probably Sisyphus. I push, every day, against the rock in my path knowing that the farther up the hill I get, the more probable it becomes that gravity will defeat my own efforts.

That's enough.

It is never too late to be what you might have been. -- George Eliot
Courage to start and willingness to keep everlasting at it are the requisites for success. -- Alonzo Newton Benn