I don’t usually engage in these, but today has been pretty rough and my partner is on a work trip this week and I don’t want to burden them needlessly right now, knowing it’s stressful for them as a baseline. Writing things down might help, I’m thinking, and posting it perhaps encourages others to also step in and share. So it might do good, even if it doesn’t really have immediate impact on me personally.
I had to pause my studies past May, and I thought initially I’d be fine and get employed in the field for the time being, while I work on my health and mind to continue. I have adhd so it gets rough sometimes, I easily burn out and it’s hard to bounce back when that happens, and for a while I lose all interest in continuing the thing. That happened with the degree this time.
But, despite having great grades (avg of ~4.5/5 overall), the degree almost complete (~85% done) and having some experience working in the field, also as an entrepreneur for a while there, the work search has been an awakening. It’s been brutal.
Without going too much into that, it’s really done a number on my confidence career-wise. This is my nth pivot of career after always getting let down by my own enthusiasm vs. apparent employability, and I really honestly think this was my last fuck to give in terms of trying to be something more career-wise. It’s a common adhd trait, pivoting, also the easy discouragement (I tend to have a brutal case of rsd when it comes to professional stuff, not so much on personal life, which is a weird combo), so I know this will keep happening, until I get lucky. It’s all about luck I think, because I’ve always been capable and proficient in these, and I’m very enthusiastic and good teamplayer, but I fucking hate advertising myself and writing a cv is always a pain since I simply can’t make myself to write it up in a manner that would signal my strengths, it’s embarrassing to try and toot my own horn. So I need to get face-to-face time to make an impression, which I tend to do if I get the chance. However, my new degree and career aspirations are in ICT, and turns out, it’s not easy to get those interviews in the first place. In fact, I’ve got exactly zero. I’ve talked extensively with some friends in the same field and all they say is I need to suck it up and write a hype cv that mentions some certain words to get past the initial filters to an interview, but no matter how hard I try, I can not do that. It’s embarrassing. Feels similarly bad like I was breaking into a house to steal their TV during daytime when I can see them in the house. It’s so fucking bad. I convinced myself I can do this, volume is key, just apply around and I’m guaranteed to get some face time within an interviewer. Nope. None. It boggles me.
So I’ve been fighting this for past few months, and I think I have to admit that the hyping thing is part of the work in this field. I do not possess that skill or capability, so I’m not fit for this field of work either. It’s fucking depressing since I thought I finally found the thing I’m good at. I feel like I’m great in most everything I’d ever have to do, have experience doing them with clients and FOSS too, top of my class in the actual programming etc. courses (I’ve struggled with physics and more advanced maths, but it’s not like I got anything below average there either…), but this one thing I can not do, hyping myself up, writing embarrassing sales pitches about myself, this is the thing that makes me unemployable? Fuck me. I did not expect this and nothing in my studies had prepared me for this one.
So right now I’m pretty worn out and slowly circling down a despair spiral. I’m past 30 and haven’t found my field yet. Nothing sticks. Either I ultimately suck, or then I’m too rigid in my weirdness to fit the bill in things like the hyping I described above. Either way I get nowhere and either have to find a new path, or give up.
So far I have managed not to give up. Always going for the next thing, trying to find the thing I’d be valuable and useful in, have a stable income and ultimately a pension to depend on. I get let down by a field, I bite my lip and go for the next one.
But this time it feels different. Like there aren’t many things left out there to try that interest me enough that I’d at least have a chance of enjoying the thing I do at least a little bit. And at the same time, I’m slowly starting to run out of time. It’s already getting late to build up a comfortable pension, so that’s one of the reasons I’d do this soon gone. I’ve pretty much tried all the things I feel interested about, even slightly, so anything that follows will probably just suck, and I’ll feel tired and spent at home after the days, and ultimately that’s going to be bad for my relationships too, family foremost. I get that most people live like that, but I’m not convinced it’s worth living for me, if it ends up being like that.
I’m already prone to get spells of clinical depression, and I’m on constant medication even when I’m doing well, as a preventive measure. I eat so many pills every morning, it’s a surprise I’ve managed to get this far in life. I don’t feel like I’d feel before I find myself at the bottom of that void, so I feel confident I’m not spiraling that way just yet, but if I don’t manage to find a goal to run towards soon, that’s bound to happen. But right now nothing seems worth it, and I’m kind of fed up with all these pivots. Start from 0 over and over again, just to make all the effort null eventually when starting another thing from 0. And these aren’t the easy kind of things. You apply to some school or degree, work that, do intern and junior work on the side, perhaps freelance like I usually do via my own company, it takes years and years of effort to learn a new thing, get competent, get experience. It’s a whole thing. And when it turns out to be for nothing and I have to start over with a new thing, it honestly fucking sucks, but at least I’ve always had the drive before, and some options to choose from. Right now there aren’t any options left. Even if I had any drive, where would I direct it? There’s nothing left. I’ve tried to apply myself in so many different things, learnt so many different professions, and I haven’t got anywhere with any of them. Either I suck in conventional ways (I.e I’m not very good at the thing despite the attempt to be) or unconventional ways (like me being unable to write hype advert of myself to get past the initial screening of applicants).
I really don’t think I have anything to offer to anyone at this point. I have a lot of drive and enthusiasm, I’m willing to learn and spend years in doing so, but none of that amounts to anything if I simply don’t get employed. It seems I’m only worth it for employers if they get me for free (intern) or for cheap and only part time (junior stuff or freelance), but the second I start looking for an actual full time job, I don’t even get the interviews. Or if I do, it happens to be the field I never got good enough in, hence not getting employed.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I’m just so frustrated and feel like I have nothing left to give. The juices have ran out. I’ve given my everything, truly, and ended up getting nowhere.
Now the options are either be a stay-at-home dad or try to just make do with something that will likely eventually drive me back down to depression. The adhd and recurring depression is a bad fucking combo and I hate being like this, but what can I do? I always take all the pills I’m given. When I’m told to change the meds or start looking for new ones, I do so. I never fight the treatments, I take anything and everything I’m given that might help. But it doesn’t make me a normal person capable of normal things, despite all. There’s nothing more I can do. I can only follow the directions and orders given to me by psychiatrists, doctors and whatnot. That’s all. And if that’s not enough for a normal life, I’ve tried to adapt, give all my years in an attempt to find a thing I could fit in. A purpose I could sustain.
But there isn’t one. Maybe there isn’t one for anyone, people just fare better with the things like not being hyper conscious and sensitive with the way they write about or present themselves. Maybe others have it exactly as hard, they just have a higher tolerance of failure and disappointment that the can keep going longer before falling down. It really fucks with one’s head to try and understand how other people manage all these things, with so much less effort, and end up with a sustainable career and no clinical depression episodes leaving them incapable of anything other than psychiatric care and hospital stays. Maybe it’s not less effort. Maybe the just simply can do more. They can support a higher amount of effort before submitting to the eternal, readily available void of nothingness and catatonic spells.
I don’t know. This is just something I’ve been trying to live with lately, but today all this is getting too much time in my brain. The suicidal ideations are getting worse and I keep finding myself just lost in watching a wall for hours, running all these thoughts on hyperdrive through and around the storms raging through my head.
It’s not as bad as it could be, I don’t feel like I need to consider writing down some instructions to loved ones to haul my suicidal ass to the psychiatric ward, not just yet anyway, but it’s still rough. Takes a toll.
So perhaps I’d better focus on that. It could be so much worse. But I keep getting back to the flipside; it could be so much better too.
But the mind does not much care for my opinions or rational thoughts. It does its thing, all I can do is try and pump the brakes the best I can when I need to, and watch the road end, hopefully in a ditch, relatively safely, and not into a fucking slope and a freefall from a cliff soon after.
But that’s my day. Hopefully it’s been better for others.
I don’t usually engage in these, but today has been pretty rough and my partner is on a work trip this week and I don’t want to burden them needlessly right now, knowing it’s stressful for them as a baseline. Writing things down might help, I’m thinking, and posting it perhaps encourages others to also step in and share. So it might do good, even if it doesn’t really have immediate impact on me personally.
I had to pause my studies past May, and I thought initially I’d be fine and get employed in the field for the time being, while I work on my health and mind to continue. I have adhd so it gets rough sometimes, I easily burn out and it’s hard to bounce back when that happens, and for a while I lose all interest in continuing the thing. That happened with the degree this time.
But, despite having great grades (avg of ~4.5/5 overall), the degree almost complete (~85% done) and having some experience working in the field, also as an entrepreneur for a while there, the work search has been an awakening. It’s been brutal.
Without going too much into that, it’s really done a number on my confidence career-wise. This is my nth pivot of career after always getting let down by my own enthusiasm vs. apparent employability, and I really honestly think this was my last fuck to give in terms of trying to be something more career-wise. It’s a common adhd trait, pivoting, also the easy discouragement (I tend to have a brutal case of rsd when it comes to professional stuff, not so much on personal life, which is a weird combo), so I know this will keep happening, until I get lucky. It’s all about luck I think, because I’ve always been capable and proficient in these, and I’m very enthusiastic and good teamplayer, but I fucking hate advertising myself and writing a cv is always a pain since I simply can’t make myself to write it up in a manner that would signal my strengths, it’s embarrassing to try and toot my own horn. So I need to get face-to-face time to make an impression, which I tend to do if I get the chance. However, my new degree and career aspirations are in ICT, and turns out, it’s not easy to get those interviews in the first place. In fact, I’ve got exactly zero. I’ve talked extensively with some friends in the same field and all they say is I need to suck it up and write a hype cv that mentions some certain words to get past the initial filters to an interview, but no matter how hard I try, I can not do that. It’s embarrassing. Feels similarly bad like I was breaking into a house to steal their TV during daytime when I can see them in the house. It’s so fucking bad. I convinced myself I can do this, volume is key, just apply around and I’m guaranteed to get some face time within an interviewer. Nope. None. It boggles me.
So I’ve been fighting this for past few months, and I think I have to admit that the hyping thing is part of the work in this field. I do not possess that skill or capability, so I’m not fit for this field of work either. It’s fucking depressing since I thought I finally found the thing I’m good at. I feel like I’m great in most everything I’d ever have to do, have experience doing them with clients and FOSS too, top of my class in the actual programming etc. courses (I’ve struggled with physics and more advanced maths, but it’s not like I got anything below average there either…), but this one thing I can not do, hyping myself up, writing embarrassing sales pitches about myself, this is the thing that makes me unemployable? Fuck me. I did not expect this and nothing in my studies had prepared me for this one.
So right now I’m pretty worn out and slowly circling down a despair spiral. I’m past 30 and haven’t found my field yet. Nothing sticks. Either I ultimately suck, or then I’m too rigid in my weirdness to fit the bill in things like the hyping I described above. Either way I get nowhere and either have to find a new path, or give up.
So far I have managed not to give up. Always going for the next thing, trying to find the thing I’d be valuable and useful in, have a stable income and ultimately a pension to depend on. I get let down by a field, I bite my lip and go for the next one.
But this time it feels different. Like there aren’t many things left out there to try that interest me enough that I’d at least have a chance of enjoying the thing I do at least a little bit. And at the same time, I’m slowly starting to run out of time. It’s already getting late to build up a comfortable pension, so that’s one of the reasons I’d do this soon gone. I’ve pretty much tried all the things I feel interested about, even slightly, so anything that follows will probably just suck, and I’ll feel tired and spent at home after the days, and ultimately that’s going to be bad for my relationships too, family foremost. I get that most people live like that, but I’m not convinced it’s worth living for me, if it ends up being like that.
I’m already prone to get spells of clinical depression, and I’m on constant medication even when I’m doing well, as a preventive measure. I eat so many pills every morning, it’s a surprise I’ve managed to get this far in life. I don’t feel like I’d feel before I find myself at the bottom of that void, so I feel confident I’m not spiraling that way just yet, but if I don’t manage to find a goal to run towards soon, that’s bound to happen. But right now nothing seems worth it, and I’m kind of fed up with all these pivots. Start from 0 over and over again, just to make all the effort null eventually when starting another thing from 0. And these aren’t the easy kind of things. You apply to some school or degree, work that, do intern and junior work on the side, perhaps freelance like I usually do via my own company, it takes years and years of effort to learn a new thing, get competent, get experience. It’s a whole thing. And when it turns out to be for nothing and I have to start over with a new thing, it honestly fucking sucks, but at least I’ve always had the drive before, and some options to choose from. Right now there aren’t any options left. Even if I had any drive, where would I direct it? There’s nothing left. I’ve tried to apply myself in so many different things, learnt so many different professions, and I haven’t got anywhere with any of them. Either I suck in conventional ways (I.e I’m not very good at the thing despite the attempt to be) or unconventional ways (like me being unable to write hype advert of myself to get past the initial screening of applicants).
I really don’t think I have anything to offer to anyone at this point. I have a lot of drive and enthusiasm, I’m willing to learn and spend years in doing so, but none of that amounts to anything if I simply don’t get employed. It seems I’m only worth it for employers if they get me for free (intern) or for cheap and only part time (junior stuff or freelance), but the second I start looking for an actual full time job, I don’t even get the interviews. Or if I do, it happens to be the field I never got good enough in, hence not getting employed.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I’m just so frustrated and feel like I have nothing left to give. The juices have ran out. I’ve given my everything, truly, and ended up getting nowhere.
Now the options are either be a stay-at-home dad or try to just make do with something that will likely eventually drive me back down to depression. The adhd and recurring depression is a bad fucking combo and I hate being like this, but what can I do? I always take all the pills I’m given. When I’m told to change the meds or start looking for new ones, I do so. I never fight the treatments, I take anything and everything I’m given that might help. But it doesn’t make me a normal person capable of normal things, despite all. There’s nothing more I can do. I can only follow the directions and orders given to me by psychiatrists, doctors and whatnot. That’s all. And if that’s not enough for a normal life, I’ve tried to adapt, give all my years in an attempt to find a thing I could fit in. A purpose I could sustain.
But there isn’t one. Maybe there isn’t one for anyone, people just fare better with the things like not being hyper conscious and sensitive with the way they write about or present themselves. Maybe others have it exactly as hard, they just have a higher tolerance of failure and disappointment that the can keep going longer before falling down. It really fucks with one’s head to try and understand how other people manage all these things, with so much less effort, and end up with a sustainable career and no clinical depression episodes leaving them incapable of anything other than psychiatric care and hospital stays. Maybe it’s not less effort. Maybe the just simply can do more. They can support a higher amount of effort before submitting to the eternal, readily available void of nothingness and catatonic spells.
I don’t know. This is just something I’ve been trying to live with lately, but today all this is getting too much time in my brain. The suicidal ideations are getting worse and I keep finding myself just lost in watching a wall for hours, running all these thoughts on hyperdrive through and around the storms raging through my head.
It’s not as bad as it could be, I don’t feel like I need to consider writing down some instructions to loved ones to haul my suicidal ass to the psychiatric ward, not just yet anyway, but it’s still rough. Takes a toll.
So perhaps I’d better focus on that. It could be so much worse. But I keep getting back to the flipside; it could be so much better too.
But the mind does not much care for my opinions or rational thoughts. It does its thing, all I can do is try and pump the brakes the best I can when I need to, and watch the road end, hopefully in a ditch, relatively safely, and not into a fucking slope and a freefall from a cliff soon after.
But that’s my day. Hopefully it’s been better for others.