NanoPoblano, Day 9: The appropriate hour to lose one’s shit.

I had a bit of a nervous breakdown somewhere around 4 this morning, because everyone knows 4am is the best time to suddenly start sobbing violently into your pillow because you’ve realized you have no fucking clue how you’ve managed to reach the age of 32 and still not have mustered up any semblance of a real career, nor the faintest idea how you might land yourself on the path to one that you might find even remotely tolerable.

Okay, maybe not the best thing to try and come to terms with when sunrise is still three hours away.

But there it is.

My husband just got a rather sizeable raise and a whopping great dose of job stability at his work immediately upon our return from Japan.

He landed his current job nearly a year ago, after we lived almost solely on my income for two years so he could go back to school and get training in a field that didn’t make him lose the will to live. He is now doing what he loves, and getting increasingly well-compensated for it into the bargain.

Well enough that he’s arguing it’s my turn to have my own chance at a new start.

Which is thoughtful and all, except *BRAIN EXPLODES*.

I hate my work. There’s no denying it. I only took the stupid job as an easy paycheck and a placeholder in my resume because I couldn’t find anything else on my return home from grad school abroad.

At the time I thought I was accepting a temporary position helping a small business prepare and migrate data during a major system upgrade. Key word, temporary.

Five years later, I’m 50% of their full-time accounting staff and I have NO FUCKING IDEA HOW THAT HAPPENED because the two things I loathe most on this earth are math and managing other people’s money.

I’ve wished meteor strikes on that building. I’ve had days where I’d rather my car be totaled on the way to work than have to deal with the asshattery waiting for me. I fantasize about quitting more than I fantasize about baked goods and chocolate.

But I’ve gotten so firmly wedged into this rut, I’ve never bothered trying to think about what I would actually do if I ever got free.

Which is why I kind of lost it when that became a real possibility.

My husband says, “I just want you to be happy,” and suddenly I’m trapped in the Total Goddamn Perspective Vortex of You Have No Career Path, panicking.

Because what it all boils down to is that I have two useless degrees, seven years of customer service experience, five years of office experience, and dick all else to my name as far as hireability goes.

So any other job I even remotely qualify for at present is just going to be more of the same fucking bullshit I’m already dealing with on a daily basis, except likely with nowhere near as kickass a manager to vent to.

Unless I go back to school…
…but for WHAT?

For the fun of it, I guess. Because there is practically nothing that truly interests me that you can actually make a living from, or that doesn’t take 8 years of apprenticeships to learn.

I haven’t been this bewildered and unsettled in a long time. I don’t know how things got this way, and I can’t turn back the hands of time to do over the parts where I fucked it all up. I just came home from a foreign land, but I’m still completely lost.

I sound like a frightened little child, and that’s how I feel. Seriously, how can I be this far into my life and not know anything?

I don’t expect answers. I don’t expect sympathy. I don’t expect anything. I just needed to take this space and let myself be frazzled and shaken and terrified and pathetic, and acknowledge that I am all those things so that I can start working on not being them.

And I’ve still got my fingers crossed for that meteor.