Finding the right words

Exasperation would perhaps best describe my state of mind at the moment but really that is not the right word. It isn't enough to say what I feel. I can't be bothered to think of anything better or more eloquent to put in its place though.

The end of last week was a particularly bad time, not for any specific reason, I just felt shit every day. Not physically; emotionally and mentally drained, unwilling and distant. I am not even sure that I was here at the end of last week. Of course, physically I was here but otherwise it felt like I was living on auto-pilot. What prompted this sense of crisis is many things. Mostly that little voice in my head that keeps on and on about how things will never get any better. Everyone says that I should stay positive and that is sound advice. I try; it is becoming harder and harder though. I find disappointment everywhere, I look for positive signs and find them wanting. I also feel a lot of anger at the injustice of where I am. The trouble is I have no direction to vent my anger. I have no one to blame, no one who is culpable, only myself. So I end up dwelling on it, over and over again until it comes to a point when I just shut myself off and drift through the days like I did at the end of last week.

I can't explain what an immense mental effort it was to go my first Open University tutorial last Saturday. It sounds ridiculous and probably is as I only had to walk into Bletchley and it was only for a couple of hours. The night before and on the Saturday morning I kept going through whether I would go or not, running all the possibilities of why I should or shouldn't. More than that, I was running through all my insecurities, all my feelings of doubt and loathing, making it all seem like a Herculean effort rather than the simple task of turning up for a few hours and getting something valuable in terms of learning. On reflection, I wonder why I do it to myself. Why do I put so many of these ridiculous barriers in my way and then view them as being completely insurmountable, when in actual fact there is nothing to fear in the first place?

I am keenly aware of when I am doing this and I know it makes no sense. I am alert to the signs of when I am not coping and I suppose I should stop myself and do something about it. Like the mantra of 'staying positive' the words come easily, doing the same comes much less so.

Where am I now? Well, I feel better than I did. I go through these phases from time to time, there is nothing new in it. This was just a particularly bad experience.

I am immensely frustrated and disappointed that I am still unemployed. Every deadline that I have set myself for getting a job has come and gone. I have only had one interview this year! Is it any wonder that I feel so pissed off? I wish I could say that I am 'keeping positive' but you already know from the above that is a lie. Not that I am completely negative; I have moments, maybe days when I feel that things are finally coming together. Then that feeling passes and I am back to where I am now, wondering if things will ever change. I keep thinking to myself, this wasn't how it was supposed to be. Not that I ever had any grand plan for life although it certainly didn't involve being 32 and unemployed with nothing important achieved.

I keep looking for work although more often than not it feels like I am just going through the motions. All the agencies I have registered with seem unfeasibly positive at first and all have great jobs that will suit me just fine and then the reality strikes and they fail to deliver anything at all. Or they seem incapable of understanding my skills and experience and matching me to jobs that would suit my background, instead offering jobs in sales, which I have no experience of and is always required for these type of roles. I trawl the Internet job sites and the local papers, occassionally a job will appeal that matches my skills and experience but then it is either a case of the salary is too low or it is in some far distant place that would be difficult, if not impossible to get too.

Stay positive? Yeah, right. I've been out of work now for three months and I've had four interviews (and two of those were with the same company)! I can't help thinking that I will never find work. I don't know where I am going from here.

I'll be glad to see the back of this week...

I heard on the radio this morning that this week is supposed to be the most depressing of the year which seems appropriate as it hasn't been a particularly good week for me. Not that anything bad or awful has happened. Its been one of those weeks where everything seems to have gone wrong, where the little problems have mounted up. Today I've gone back to my old ways, what I call the 'fat Mark' way of thinking, which is that if I am under stress or unhappy I'll find comfort in food, so yep, I've been grazing all day, eating all the wrong kind of things, not doing any exercise at all. Just sitting on my fat behind and feeling miserable about it. So, let's get it off my chest!

Monday - I hate Mondays! Even though I am not working at the moment, there is something about Monday mornings, which just isn't conducive to being happy. I was feeling rather unwell on Monday this week, getting disconcerting dizzy spells, which I realised later could have been something to do with forgetting to take my blood pressure tablets the day before. It sounds silly but it could have been the cause, although the long list of horrible side-effects on the medication does warn that one of the commonest ones is dizziness, vertigo and the like. Whatever, it made me feel unwell all day. I also had a call on Monday to advise that the engineer who was coming to fix my boiler on Tuesday was off sick so the job wouldn't be done. After much hassle and some 'phone calls later, the engineer is now coming next Tuesday...although I'll only believe it when he's actually here. In the meantime I don't have a reliable supply of hot water.

I can't remember what happened on Tuesday but something went wrong, I know. Maybe it was the lights blowing in the lounge...No, I know what it was, I'd spent a long time over the weekend and Monday and Tuesday working on redesign of a web site that I manage for one of the railway societies I belong too. Only thing is when I came to update it, everything got cocked up and I managed to delete a fairly important file by mistake. All got sorted in the end but that was stressful!

Wednesday was my sign-on day at the Job Centre, which always makes me feel down. I find it so demoralising and degrading, especially when most of the people there seem to be no-hopers or benefit cheats. The advisor I see there, nice guy but completely useless. I had a whinge about the fact that if I was a single mother I'd probably be better off and that I feel penalised under the benefits system because I am a single person with no dependents. How is anyone supposed to live on £60 per week? I was just sounding off.

Yesterday I had a job interview, which went okay apart from the fact that they kept me waiting for almost half-hour! Yes, thirty bloody minutes before anyone came to see me! I was annoyed about that but was even more annoyed that in the afternoon I had an appointment with an agency for temporary work, which proved to be a complete waste of time. Apparently because I possess neither a passport nor a full birth certificate (I do have a birth certificate but I am told it is not a full one) they were unable to register me. I am beginning to hold agencies with the same contempt as IFA's. Stupid rules! The interview in the morning on a positive note seemed to go well and I passed the first bit, which was a telephone test. I find out early next week if I got the job.

When I eventually got home I decided that I would sort out my Sky box so that I can record from Sky. Easy I thought. Oh dear, how misguided must I be? I nearly turned the flat upside down looking for the instruction manuals for my DVD player and the Sky box and could I find them? Well, of course not. Being a man my filing skills are not what they could be and I hoard so many different things, stuff inevitably gets shoved in folders and away in boxes or on bookcases where it has no right to belong. Anyway I found the necessary instructions today and made all the connections as per the diagrams but guess what...still can't work out how to record from Sky, so I've given up on that.

Today, I've just been in a bad mood. I had a bad dream last night, which I think freaked me out more than I thought because it was still lingering with me when I woke up. Its probably a result of all the fretting that I've been doing all week.

Tomorrow I am taking myself out for the day to see a bit of the countryside and get some fresh air. Hopefully things will go a bit smoother next week.