April 18, 2003 - Failure

It's time to come clean about my many failures at this point in my life.

Almost 2 years ago, I lost a good job at Sloans Lake. It paid well, I had many friends there, I was well-qualified for the job, and I felt mostly respected for the job I did. I let my emotions and lack of self-discipline get the better of me, and wound up alienating some of the people around me and leaving my boss feeling like she had no choice but to fire me. If any of you have worked with bad employees, you know that a boss has to be pushed pretty far to feel able to let an employee go. I can complain all I want about how unfair it was, and how there had to be something political involved, but it boils down to my failure to even do enough to justify being kept as an employee.

At first, I tried to make the best of it. I felt that a change would probably help me emotionally, and research showed me that positions I qualify for are paying well above what I was getting paid at Sloans Lake. I was determined to turn my failure into an improvement in my life, but it didn't turn out that way.

Eventually, I understood that I wasn't going to be getting one of those higher-paying jobs any time soon, so I resigned myself to working in tech support for low wages for a while. I had a sudden change in my life's interests, so I was determined to explore that new horizon. I read and read and read, and eventually decided that this new motivation to study and learn would be enough to get me through my historically miserable school attendance. Here is where my second failure came in. While I did manage to keep myself motivated longer than usual, and I found the classes much more interesting, I eventually fell back into the same doldrums I always have. Again, my lack of self-discipline got the best of me, and I missed some key events in classes, dooming myself to failure.

Now I find myself not only unable to enjoy life as I used to, but unable to support my family, pay bills, or explore new possibilities for my future. I'm stuck in a seemingly endless spiral of failure which may require something drastic to get out of (Note to the paranoid: I'm not going to hurt myself or anyone else, so relax).

I don't know what it will take to wake myself up. I don't know what I'm going to wind up doing. I haven't lost my belief that I can be successful at pretty much anything, but the problem is GETTING there. All I know is that right now I am a failure... and I know that having people remind me of what a failure I am doesn't help.