Rumination

It is nearly 3 in the morning, in a week in which I've been in bed long before midnight every day. I have a meeting tomorrow... Not with OW, not a job interview... A meeting with my worker at Goodwill. I am, for some reason, terrified, and although I know in my mind that there is no reason whatsoever to expect he will be anything less than impressed and encouraging at how much I have accomplished, learned, and done over the past few months, what I actually expect in my heart is to be told that I am an utter failure at job searching and at life no matter how hard I try. I have been feeling a deep malaise for the past two days, drifting between a depressed despondency and the edge of panic. I'm quite aware of it, and it's driving me crazy. I know I'm being irrational, but the capacity I seemed to have a couple of weeks ago to simply stop seems to have evaporated somewhere. Could it have something to do with the two consecutive days last week that I missed taking my pill because I'd forgotten to get more of them? Am I just really this insecure about not doing everything the way my Goodwill workshops advised me to? Is this a hellish conspiracy between my menstrual cycle and my self-destructiveness to throw me into the most hormonal mess I'll be in all month at a very important time?

None of my progress has been undone... And yet it all seems empty. I can repeat in my mind that I've come a long way and done a great deal, I can list my accomplishments - among them the fact that I've gotten two shifts of paid freelance work from my job searching... and none of it is enough for my inner critic. Why? I was capable of being so self-assured last fortnight...

I think I know why. I spent a modest chunk of Thursday and Friday last week job searching online, and it was completely fruitless. I tried posting ads for service on Kijiji, and got three responses: one asking if I was interested in a pure commission job from home, which I am not, and the other two, one duplicated across two ads, from characters who read as sexual predators seeking prey significantly less wary and streetwise than I. This abject failure and reminder of the dark side of humanity has been a harrowing and exhausting experience and has drained heavily on my hope. That's probably got a great deal to do with it. I feel I've been doing everything wrong because as of this writing, my last attempt was a horrid failure and it leaves me feeling incompetent and doomed.

Hopefully, then, moving past this to some other try, probably using a slightly different medium, will refresh and reinvigorate me. I am glad I was able to identify the seed of my malaise. Now, powers willing, may I move past it, and present myself and my accomplishments with the pride I deserve in my meeting?