Hey everyone, thanks for all the warm welcomes. I'm doing my best to hold in there. Have not put together much sober time these past months, maybe a week, tops. Then I will go several days, and get really bored, and go out.
I have to admit, the past month has been difficult. I have been slipping into a pretty deep depression here, but am OK, at least on the surface. Basically I know what is wrong and yet I have been unable to change it for so long, or had no luck. What is getting me down is the monotony that has become my life. The one hour commute here, the one hour commute back. The same places, over and over and over. All that cement, the highway, the traffic. Never any real variety or change of scene. No vacations, or time to recover; things keep popping up that make me use up my leave, like being sick, or my mate when he got beat up for no reason, and we had to go to court & press charges, the car getting damaged---it just eats away all my vacation time I might have saved. And then all this pressure builds up inside that really craves something different, a heightened or altered, chemically induced state has been the stand in, you could say.
And then, things falling apart faster and faster, so much stuff I have to do, mounding up, yet I just sleep and lay in bed reading. The basics are starting to go undone. I have not checked my e-mail for 3 weeks, have not checked the mail for weeks, have not checked my phone messages, though my mate says if somebody calls. I have not bought any decent amount of groceries in weeks, nor done laundry in months, and the car is 7 moths past due for the emissions test; I should change the oil, before. My mate has also felt much the same. We have no days off together.
I have been unable to find a new job or change my hours for 6 years now, this is killing me. I have had some bad drinking nights, or I should say they are fun at the time, and make it so I can pass out and sleep, but even that seems boring.
I am not sure what has brought this on so hard, but I feel a void has opened up, and have lost hope in things, I guess. Even in writing...I think that if it held the promise that I could make $$$ from it, and a decent living, I'd be more motivated, yet I just can't see that path these days...or get beyond the basics that remain undone to have the time to focus. I'm worried, my therapist seemed worried. I just see no way out.
I think I would be happy with a job I could walk to, a place I could better afford, a less hectic/urban setting...but I can't see any way that can happen, with horrible credit and bad rental references. I try to think in practical terms, how can I get out of this? So I have time again to do things I love, and the energy? And I just can not see any path.
And so I have gone into a kind of hiding. My parents think I am going to visit, and my mate thinks we are going to Michigan, but I do not have enough time off saved up...and I will have to disappoint them all. Maybe he can go alone, and I'll stay behind. It really hurts, not to be able to get up there, and see the wilderness, the lakes, friends relatives...has been about 2 years, now.
But all these days, and so similar, so boring and draining, even my sex drive has gone away, pretty much. I'm trying hard to pull out of this, but not sure how. I tried to meditate on this, and all I could think was how I have no time, and everything is always so monotonous and secondhand, I can read or watch movies, but all I see are representations of things, and not a variety of things and places and experiences, it feels in ways like I am in a prison, constructed by a lack of an ongoing way to afford to get out. There is such little variety. I feel like my life is a mud-puddle that is drying up.
It's like I have lost the will to go on. It's not exactly a suicidal feeling, like I am going to do something rash, but a kind of giving up, a recklessness, a ceasing to care what happens, because I am so old, and I can not imagine ever settling into a career I actually like with a ****** economy and that I would be almost 50 if I went back to school, and places don't like to hire that old of people, as I am reminded of all the time by the news. I don't see any examples I can look to, and say, wow, they did what I would like to do! I don't have mentors, or a support system. My idea was to try to publish some of my poetry, build a publishing reputation, get a teaching certificate, maybe a masters, and then try and teach writing in a school for the arts/liberal private school/Quaker school, some kind of setting that would allow more freedom and involve interaction with the next generation, as in many ways, I relate better to younger people than older ones. But this dream is slipping away, as I have no way to take classes, due to my stupid schedule, and no way to just borrow enough to go to school and live, due to my crummy credit, for at least 7 more years...then, it would be way too late.
And so, I have come to think: Live or Die? What does it matter. I have been trying meditation, but this is what it led me to think.