I live in a world where I don’t do what I love.  Hell, I don’t even do what I like.  I do it because I know it, I am very good at it, and it pays the bills.  I would imagine that’s about 95% of us out there.  But that’s not really what my problem is.

I have always chosen the career path.  I mean, I *could* have lived in my car, I suppose, but I preferred to eat and stay fat.  So I worked.  My second marriage failed; I didn’t get the opportunity to have a child.  That one really was out of my control.

Recently, I purged myself of all my guilt by writing letters of amends to a few people in my life.  One letter came back returned because I had to send it to the mother of the person, and I suspect she has passed.  The other two, well, I didn’t hear back, and I didn’t expect to.  I didn’t need to.  I said what I needed to say.  I felt better.  Till I started this job.

And all the old feelings came back.  The feelings of isolation.  The feelings of “is this all there is to my life?”  My first weekend home was 40 hours long.  I spent most of it with my dogs, feeling horribly guilty that I had left them with my vet all week.  I don’t remember feeling this way before when I traveled.  But now, it really bothers me.  I pay for my dogs to live elsewhere, just so I can see them on the weekends.  And my dogs are my life.  I really have no other life outside of them.  They are the most important things in the world to me.  They are all I have that justifies my existence. They are all I have to come home to.

That is not how I intended my life to be.  I always thought it would be filled with a husband, maybe a family, or a large extended family.  That I would belong to a familial group; not just a group of friends, of which I have few.  And most of those people are inaccessible most of the time.

I pay someone else to listen to me and guide me in my choices in life.  Not my friends.  They honestly don’t know me all that well, except for one. 

I came to the conclusion some time ago that I did not want to lead a life of solitude.  I wanted to have people in my life.  I was making strides toward that until this job came up.  And took my life away from me again.  But honestly, I really had no other choice.

I don’t even like what I do.  My passion is business intelligence; NOT enterprise portfolio management.  And now, I have to look into PMP certification, and I HATE project management.  Oh yes, I can cite all the best practices and help you build a fantastic PMO, but I never ever ever in my life want to be a project manager.  I love to work with business intelligence.  Period.  But the BI suite that we implemented is not at all what I would have chosen from the product suite available to us.  Nor is it the product suite from the same vendor that I know.

But I digress.  The bottom line is, my career has never been an issue.  I have always been quite passionate about it, and have done well.  Now, I find myself completely disinterested in what I do, but I can do it.  But in order for me to do it, there has to be something worth coming home to.  And there is nothing except my dogs.  And when I leave them with the vet, I cry all the way to the airport.

I sit here, knowing that if I gave my dogs a new home, I would have no reason to come home, except to check the mail.  And that’s not a pity thing; that’s the god’s honest truth.  And that is no way to live.

I look back on my past, and it is filled with horrific regret.  I regret everything, and am happy for nothing.  I would do everything differently.  I mean, everything.  I do not want the life that I have.  I do not want what has been set in motion.  I find great displeasure in my life on a daily basis.  I am exhausted constantly, and I haven’t realized why until now.  I am just so tired.

I feel really old.  I feel at the edge of the world.  I don’t have the tenacity in me anymore that I used to have, the hope that tomorrow might be better.  I don’t have that feeling that in two years, I will have accomplished something incredible.  I only feel mediocrity and flat-lining in me now.  And that is not where I want to be.  I feel no burning desire in me to make an effort in a world where I used to excel with great success.  I was known for being the best at what I did.  Now, I couldn’t give a rat’s ass.  I just want to get it over with and go home for the day.  And hide, and read my books, and cry because I miss my dogs, and have nothing to come home to on the weekends.

For the first time in my life, I don’t want to eat.  When I am depressed, I hide in food.  Now, I think of food and it sickens me.  It’s like it’s the only thing I can control in my life right now.  I hold off as much as I can, till I am sick, then I eat a little bit.  It’s the best I can do.  Except Thai food.  Okay, I ate Thai twice in two weeks.  I can’t say no to Pad Thai.  Sorry.  Just can’t.

I feel no hope.  I don’t feel “hopeless”; I just feel no hope.  I feel like I have no desire left in me.  No “oomph”.  No “hey, you know, I want to get up tomorrow and totally kick the world’s ass”.  Maybe I am going through mid-life.  I don’t know.  All I know is that my lifestyle does not lend itself to finding anyone to be with, and never will.  You are either attached when you start traveling, or you aren’t and won’t be as long as you do travel.  Because on the weekends, you are just too exhausted to do a damned thing.

I don’t want to blog.  I don’t want to be on my online bipolar disorder support group.  There is nothing wrong with my medications.  This is a personal struggle and battle that I am fighting, and I don’t know what the end result is going to be.

What I DO know is my ex-husband has put my, well, my old house (which was my dream home) on the market, and stands to reap 60k from it, while I put all I had into it when we got married, and received no equity from the house when we divorced, since there was no equity in it when he decided he didn’t want me anymore because I was too “broken” for him.  That I was worthless, unworthy, and a giant piece of shit (not my words, but they still ring in my ears).

What I do know is that I am going to be 36 in less than two months, and I never intended to have children after 35.  I won’t, because I have no prospects, and my options are quite limited considering how I look and the fact that I travel, and most men are already into their second marriages by now.

What I do know is, my family is very small.  It will be even smaller over the next five years.  In the next few years, it will just be me, my brother, SIL and niece, who is already in her teens.  Not how I grew up.  Very small.  Very depressing.  And we grow more distant by the week, because they are super busy since my brother travels and works in another town like I do, and they have limited time on the weekends to see each other.  I talk to them about maybe, once a month, and that’s only by email.

When my father passes, I will have lost the closest man to me in my life.  My father knows me better than any human being on the face of the planet.  And that will leave me with that woman.  The woman who bore me, and considers me the root of all evil in her world.  The one who professes to love me in her emails to me, while renouncing the possibility of her genes ever having passed from her to me at all.  I am the embarrassment of her existence, for many, many reasons.  That’s her problem, not mine, but it still stings.

My world is small.  It will become very much smaller in the swiftly coming years.  This is not at all what I intended for my life.  I always did the next best thing that came to me.  I gave all to my husbands.  I gave all I had emotionally and monetarily to provide a good home and existence for us.  And each time, I found myself broke, uneducated and lost. 

And when I think about these things, I find no energy to continue to “try”.  I find no reason to have hope.  It’s not depression.  It’s a reality to me.  It’s not “oh woe is me, I am going to go eat worms in the garden and die”.  It’s an honest to god reflection and analysis of my life thus far, finding that I regret 100% of my life to date, and cannot find one thing that I feel was worthwhile and that I can be proud of in my life.  I find nothing in my life that provides the impetus for me to carry on.  Nothing that says, “hey, you did that right, and not only that, I value that choice and that outcome.  Do more of that.”

I see regret, pain, mistakes, hurt people, people that debase me and devalue me, and two dogs that deserve a hell of a lot better than I am giving them.

This is not the life I want.  I just don’t have the energy to create a different one anymore.