Talking to Myself

Me: Sometimes I will catch myself talking to an invisible audience, but I promise you there are people there, the ones who are interested in what I have to say. It is an amalgamated crowd, no face I recognise, or you would either, I imagine. But they aren’t demons. Not monsters, feeding in my delusions, feeding on what is making me frightened, or nervous, or rightfully stressed. This audience I speak to might never quite be explained, but they are here with me right now, listening to this conversation. Typically they do not speak. But if they did, this is what I imagine they would tell me:

Tangelo: Get off your ass.

Me: And do what? This is when the thing we will call Tangelo stares back at me with hollow eyes and merely gestures to the world at large. I sit in front of my computer with Seek.com opened to the page for job postings from Today, and see there is only one in the subsection for Retail, because I have decided it is far more likely I will be hired to greet customers, and smile and wave.

Tangelo: Come on, find a job already. You’re capable.

Me: Tangelo, I have come to figure, can be a hardass, but the reassurance is genuine. It is important—I remind myself—to remember that these are not the voices in my head, because those are not necessarily given identities, given faces. They all look and sound like I do. A figure like Tangelo is sitting at my side, in the front of an audience, watching me make another fatal mistake, which I phrase as a decision. See here: I closed the tab out, exited the browser completely. I decided that was enough searching for a job for one day, although how many jobs did I apply for today? Are we keeping track, Tangelo?

Tangelo: It was two. Two jobs.

Me: Right. Other people are able to boast of having applied to more, or certainly those who use the new-fangled AI application sites that apply to any relevant nonsense with a click of a button. I for one think applying for a job should require purpose, a personal sifting-through, reading the details, feigning interest, but who am I? Jobless. Clearly doing something wrong, or not accepting any job available to me. Dwindling down time. Repeating myself. Talking to air.

Tangelo: I think you need a smaller audience.

Me: My audience of one now thinks I should downsize. Maybe with you gone I would be able to focus on finding meaningful employment again.

Tangelo: I don’t think I am the problem.

Me: You’re right. You aren’t. The other day I was watching Game Changer, which is a reality game show with a shifting format each episode, and I thought about how a person went about getting a job working behind-the-scenes for something like that. Realistically, I have little to offer—I am not artistic, beyond having the ability to write, and much of the creative brilliance behind the show is built around artistry—but I think it would be beneficial, for me to be in a conductive environment like that. Where I was excited about going to work.

Tangelo: Would you like to remind everyone how long you have been unemployed?

Me: In under a week from now it will have been one year. A calendar year, and I am afraid there is hardly anything to show for it. For a month of that year, I whisked myself to Europe to pretend to be worldly. At a moment’s notice, I tell someone, anyone, about the little piece of the world I have witnessed beyond my home country, and they either seem interested, or fake interested, or the absolute fear: they think I am merely bragging to seem interesting. I catch myself saying not to brag to hopefully avoid the disdain of people who cannot afford overseas travel because they have rent to pay, and the electrical bill, and credit card debt, and car insurance.

Tangelo: If you found yourself a new job, you could find a new place to live. And pay rent.

Me: That’s the dream, isn’t it? Employment brings the excitement of moving my life forward, setting it on the tracks, rather than retaining it suspended above. I am a shell of what it means to be an adult human being because I do not pay rent, or an electrical bill, or swipe a credit card.

Tangelo: I didn’t say that.

Me: No one has said that directly to my face, either. It is a fascinating trick of being a person, that sometimes the weights you set on your own shoulders are not weights named by other people. Maybe it would be more productive to have someone in my ear reminding me my life is continuing to careen off course, first had gone the wheels, no more tire tracks. Then the brake stopped braking. The side mirrors snapped clean off. PRNDL no longer functioned. The steering wheel froze up. It’s amusing because a car metaphor should come from anyone but the boy without his driver’s license.

Hetty: Stop calling yourself a boy, you are a man.

Me: My audience is growing instead of shrinking.

Tangelo: I hate that.

Me: I don’t feel like a man. Perhaps I never have. A man has employment, of which I do not, and willingly gave up. A man has moved out of home—part of me does wish I had an American adolescence so I had been thrust from the nest at eighteen without choice, although the version of myself at eighteen was no more man than I am now. A man can say he has independence, even if he is tied up in a romantic relationship with someone who does limit it.

Hetty: Stop defining a word, you are more than a word.

Me: Am I? A boy is governed by his lack of freedoms. I cannot find work, therefore I cannot move out of my parents’ place, because I would otherwise fret over money every single week and I can hardly imagine finding a place when all I have to show for myself are payments from the government. Is that your idea of a man? Someone with his tail between his legs.

Tangelo: Don’t pretend the audience at your feet has anything interesting to say. They aren’t inside your head. They are there, right beside you, when you turn your head to say something aloud that should have been kept in secret.

Me: The peanut gallery, as it were. You’re right. I am interviewing myself.

Tangelo: You’re attempting to.

Me: A boy is unable to change the mistake. He repeats it, over and over, expecting a new outcome.

Hetty: Stop pretending all children are the same.

Me: I check my emails throughout the day hoping for a new outcome. A new email that instead of noticeably containing the phrase “Unfortunately, it looks unlikely that your application will progress further” says something to the tune of “We would love to talk to you about setting a time for an interview!” I attend interviews occasionally, although I seem doomed to count myself lucky on each one. It is a sobering feeling, to be rejected, or to be ghosted entirely. Not by a handsome man, or even an average-looking one, but by work.

Tangelo: It’s worse to be rejected by someone ugly, or considerably more annoying than you are.

Me: You can’t say stuff like that.

Tangelo: I am not a puppet on a children’s program; I am a faceless being in your whimsy audience you talk to when you’re going insane.

Me: I don’t go insane.

Tangelo: Oh, sorry, you are insane already.

Me: I am clinically depressed.

Tangelo: And you have paperwork for that, I assume? Or a file in a cabinet somewhere that verifies you should be whisked away to the loony bin as soon as someone realises you escaped?

Me: That is reductive language.

Tangelo: I am a reductive participant.

Me: You’re a ghost. When I hope to see someone, someone who will listen to everything I have to say about how I find myself after having quit my job almost a year ago, all I see is a white sheet flapping in the wind and all I hear is some Scooby-Doo music playing in the background.

            You know, I finally decided to actually try to see my therapist again yesterday.

Tangelo: That’s helpful and positive of you.

Me: It seems currently pointless. I am sitting here, waiting for a response from him, thinking if there is a lengthy delay I am being ignored, or avoided. Of course I understand I am only client, and he is only Psychologist, but two days of silence makes me squirm. It makes me wonder whether I waited too long to make another appointment, as if he as Psychologist cares whether I dawdle and not schedule something in the months between, I don’t know, March and August. In truth I realise perhaps I sent a message to the wrong number, because the website has a different number, and then I think there is insanity to wondering why, after three days, I haven’t heard anything. I should probably email or call my therapist, instead. But the modern world is tech-savvy.

Tangelo: You can’t possibly think a Professional gives a single crap whether you see them every month or once every six months. Don’t kid yourself, bud. You know well enough there is reason to be patient. You tell yourself that when you wake up.

Me: I try to. I ought to be the type of person by now to have mantras, but the only thing I believe as an example of repetition in my little life are the six words—and the exclamation mark—written out on a loose palm card stuck to the almost-empty shelf above this computer. “You will figure this shit out!” I think I wrote that and stuck it there a few months after I resigned.

            Do you want to know what else is on the shelf?

Tangelo: Besides your shattered dreams?

Me: Yes. I went, one Halloween, to work dressed as the Scarecrow from one of my favourite films of all time, The Wizard of Oz. There was a customer who saw me in-costume and chuckled, because I had painted my nose red, or attempted to, at least, it was a shaky job. The Scarecrow in the film has a painted-brown-nose, but I was not interested in coming across racist, or anything of the sort, so I opted for red, because it at least gave the impression I was not merely a farmer with straw sticking out of pockets and things. The customer kept reminding me he visualised the red nose every time he saw me afterwards. Anyway, the point of the story is I kept the “straw”—uninspiringly I had intended on actually sticking straw to things, to my pockets, to the trouser-legs, to the sleeve-holes. It was a complete failure and itched and scratched and fell, so I pivoted. Pivoted to the second option, which was the ball of yarn, the colour of straw and hay, although more so the fairytale kind that you would see in like, an animated version of Animal Farm that completely missed the message. Which they seemed to have made recently, but whatever. There is the heaped pile of this yarn on the shelf.

Tangelo: You have collected a souvenir out of unspooled yarn. Okay, cool?

Me: The yarn is mostly just the bed for a blue mushroom guy, who is unfortunately nameless. Although maybe I will call him Tangelo, now, and then you have body permanence.

Tangelo: As a blue mushroom guy? Terrific. So, the shelf is the home of a shrine to a mushroom god you would not worship, because aside from rejecting all religion, you find it impossible to stick to anything?

Me: Let me at least stick to finishing my description of the shelf. When I was in Europe—not to brag—specifically when I was in London, England, I sought out the rubber duck store because I had heard a lot about it, and I wanted affordable souvenirs where I could get them. In the store, I bought an Elphaba rubber duck, which sits upon the shelf. To the right of the sign reading “You will figure this shit out!” There is some sort of messaging there, everyone deserves a chance to fly, but I do seriously wonder if I do deserve that. A chance. Anymore.

Hetty: Stop belittling yourself for the sake of the internet’s pity. You can accomplish your goals.

Me: If I ceased the belief I have in myself, it would not be uncomplicated to stop trying. This is another thing I tell myself, often enough, when I think merely about what I am doing right now. If I gave up on myself, it would be simple to drift away. This is the thought process of a suicidal person. Being unemployed makes you a lot more suicidal than you once were, did you know that?

Tangelo: That’s obvious, pumpkin.

Me: Don’t give me nicknames, they feel forced. They’re made-up from thin air, too.

Tangelo: I’m trying to appear to be interested in you.

Me: Ouch.

Hetty: Stop creating drama for the sake of drama.

Me: I am going to read you something I wrote down in my phone—so, I typed it, I should say—about where my mental health was on Saturday the 25^th of July 2026. “I want life to get to a point where I no longer have anything good to look forward to so I can justify floating off into the horizon in a cloud of dust.’ Understandably not even this audience of invisibles heard that aloud. It was saved and ignored, but ignoring it didn’t erase the thought from having existed.

Tangelo: You have talked about being suicidal before, and you have reiterated then, too, that you never intend on following through with anything. Is this not mindless repetition for no good reason?

Me: Is me pouring this out into words not also mindless repetition? Soon I will talk about my headaches again, talk about my lack of energy again, blame my inability to focus and write a new, original cover letter every single time for every application as the exact reason why I have not found work yet…

Tangelo: It could be the reason…

Me: I have no clue how to make a cover letter more interesting, or more targeted to an employer. I don’t have personal stories to share, not stories I imagine a representative of the company would truly care about. Some say no one even reads cover letters anymore, others say no one reads your resume.

Tangelo: Many say AI reads everything and the human being simply nods their head in agreement when the robot-machine tells them this individual found all the buzzwords.

Me: That, too. You parrot back my thoughts to me. You are climbing further and further inside my head without noticing it, or you are climbing further outside. I can’t tell. All the same you are persistent, and that can be comforting. Or it can’t.

Tangelo: If I mine your brain for answers, it will tell me where I come from. Can I peer inside your head, the way you want to peer at mine?

Me: We don’t need to physically go up there.

Hetty: Stop using the word don’t. Or can’t. Or won’t. You could work that type of job if you were given the opportunity for it.

Me: Most of the what-ifs hinge on being given an opportunity, don’t they? When I apply to something, I mostly believe I could do what the tin suggests is your responsibilities, but then, I have to be given the opportunity. I have to be interviewed, and then processed, hired, trained. Because my experience is in retail, and supermarket customer service at that, I come with a warning: green. Unexperienced. Train me, or program me from scratch. Mostly I feel like a robot servant no one quite knows how to operate. The instructions were not packaged with the model. The instructions are confusing. It’s just a series of pictures, and I don’t even know where that wall came from, it is just suddenly there now.

Tangelo: For a robot servant, you sure complain a lot.

Me: I wish I was capable of operating without the ability to complain. I envy, sometimes, the type of person to float through life without being weighted down by their own expectations for things to be better. There is a misery to that I think is self-destructive of me: why would I want a life that is so visibly miserable other people notice, but I am incapable of noticing? I twist the cap around on my own life and think, other people must notice every single imperfection I am seemingly incapable of prodding at until it buckles. Like the joblessness, the living-at-home, the inability to hold a romantic relationship for longer than eight months—

Tangelo: You can blame the esoteric sexuality you adopted for that.

Me: Being aegosexual is like having a disease no one has ever heard of. But it is also the single-most definable part of myself, in a sense. But this side-tracked conversation achieves nothing, because I surely couldn’t find employment teaching people what having an unknown sexuality that sounds like trauma to the uneducated looks like. I don’t want a teaching job, anyhow. I can only stomach an audience that does not typically respond back to me.

Hetty: Stop pretending you are not capable of leadership. Let’s look at your resume again: you were a supervisor, you trained new hires, you hijacked the leadership role for the online arts and literature magazine in university because you couldn’t handle the idea of the work not being insanely organised. You were successful at that.

Me: No company cares about some experience I had for an online arts and literature magazine I didn’t get paid for and wouldn’t even technically have a phone number. For a while I left the entry about ScratchThat on my resume because I thought it was good indicator of my ability to be skilful, and successful at meeting targets and things, but I cut it recently from most of my resumes. I suppose I thought it was becoming unserious to think anyone gave much thought to what was an obvious university exercise.

Tangelo: You sound miserable.

Me: I am. This is a fact well established.

Tangelo: Did you no longer think those skills were transferable?

Me: I still think they are, but something was clearly blocking me from employment. I considered maybe it was the foolish reliance on all of that and that to be realistic meant to rest on what had an official title, and belonged to a reputable company. I could have said ScratchThat was a branch of QUT but then it becomes entirely obvious the only reason I was “Team Leader” was because a Student had to be.

Tangelo: I see what attempting to find a job has done to your brain. You’re broken.

Me: Hence, of course, why I am trying to ease back into going to therapy. There are only so many times you can stomach telling your friends you are okay, or that their advice is helpful. Mostly it can be, but I feel all the more broken the more I hear you will find something soon, I know it. Mostly, I suppose, because I do not believe it so much anymore. How long is soon? How long is now?

Tangelo: I have an exercise for you. Just hear me out.

Me: Okay.

Tangelo: Can you describe what I look like?

Me: You’re…invisible.

Tangelo: No, I’m not, not right now. Just look at me.

Me: I said you weren’t humanoid. The shapes don’t make a body, not like a human’s, with the limbs, the hands, the contours of the face—eyes, ears, mouth, nose. Untamed eyebrows. You have the ability to sit, though, but you are somewhere between human and animal. A bit like a tree kangaroo deformed by a blizzard.

Tangelo: A vicious image. Okay. If you weren’t on a watchlist before, you are now. He’s over here, boys. The one who is losing his mind over not being able to find employment.

Me: It’s incredibly important to be able to afford to be alive.

Tangelo: I didn’t say it wasn’t.

Me: The irrational part of myself understands your rhetoric. All this woe, all this worrying, over something designed by a system meant to separate the weak from the burly, strong-men and -women perched above in their lavishes. I was not born with the mentality to be a self-made millionaire, and nor should I necessarily want to be. Eat the rich, and such. I was not born with the mentality to know how to benefit myself, and there is the timebomb counting down to the day I puff out with a whisper. All throughout high school I had no concrete idea of how I wanted to spend the rest of my life, and I suppose a lot of teenagers do, because such an expectation is deranged for sixteen-year-olds who haven’t even realised they are terrified of driving yet. In the first few years of university I was barraged with the knowledge I would most likely not be in the abysmal-percentage of writers who became Authors. The capital letter is for Actually-Successful.

Tangelo: Nowadays you need to mask your transphobia for the better portion of your career, churning out palatable, samey, ordinary novels rated E for Everyone, and then unmask yourself when it is too late for the spineless to give a damn.

Me: I realised in university my problem was not being able to write novels rated E for Everyone. [I have edited the original draft of this piece to be more friendly for a wider audience.]

Tangelo: Although neither of us is certain there isn’t black mould growing on your walls. But hey. I am sure Hetty will burst in with a rhetoric about how you don’t believe for a second that a trans person walking into a bathroom is doing so with the sole intent of sexually assaulting you.

Me: Do I have to continue berating myself with the timeline of my life, or what I remember of it? My memory is becoming hazier and hazier, I have to wonder what age is the last I truly remember.

            I’m not entirely sure I remember being eleven.

Tangelo: I know exactly why that is.

Me: Oh, right. Is it harmful to think I no longer remember an age where I wasn’t burdened by something? My time as a prop, the high school years of stomaching my anxiety, early university thinking I was walking into a trap, and then suddenly my body collapses in on itself with the headaches, and the stomach pain, and the never-ending sore throat. The pressure to do something with myself when I finally graduated from university. Being an unemployed waste of space. Not even wanting to disappoint another man in a relationship.

Hetty: Stop considering your so-called issues to be faults that make you unlovable.

Me: You know, in all my years of being in therapy, my therapist always reminded me it was positive, for me, to write down what was going on in the ratty old brain of mine. I can’t pretend the idea of returning to it was entirely my own, and I am half-imagining myself not here, in my bedroom, but in the bedroom of a lakeside cabin in Maine. Not handcuffed, at least. I recently finished reading Gerald’s Game by Stephen King, and the main character, who is handcuffed for a good, miserable portion of the book, talks to the voices in her head, and witnesses them too.

Tangelo: I thought we established I wasn’t a voice . . .

Me: . . .but a frozen-over, semi-shattered tree kangaroo mix, yes. You are horrific, but realistic.

Tangelo: So long as I am not an actual talking tangelo.

Me: I have enough creativity still in my body to imagine something more interesting.

Tangelo: Imagine, then, that the next time you get an interview for a job you are interested in, not merely because it pays, but because you like the work, you don’t make a stupid mistake at some point during it. Because you sure like to imagine there were definable mistakes in your last few interviews. The little you get. For the last job, your body automatically shut itself down at the close and you, what, didn’t offer out your hand to shake theirs, you didn’t make a great closing impression, and you realised this walking down the street five minutes later. That was your great screw up. But this time, you do well. No errors. Imagine that, hold onto that.

Me: Where am I positioning myself, then? What is the scenario afterwards?

Tangelo: Just let yourself think about this positive reinforcement of something going right. Jessie Burlingame must have had something to say about all of that. From your book.

Me: She was preoccupied with her handcuffs. But yes. I started, after that, reading I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki by Baek Sehee. The perseverance of women seems to be a natural flow-theme between the two books. The perseverance of people. Because I have yet to resume going to therapy, the conversations I have right now are with you, and with my employment agency provider—gosh, that is wordy—and with friends, who either want to listen or don’t, and with myself. I told the person whose job it is to assist me in finding meaningful employment that I am out of ideas entirely, and that applying for more and more jobs, and receiving more and more rejection is simply wiping me clean of the ability to be hopeful.

Tangelo: Did she berate you for caving to your depression? Or did she find alternate angles for how to help you out of the hole?

Me: It was the latter. I like to think I am not surrounded by people who wish the worst for me. They remind me they want to see me succeed, which I am coming to believe is language that was more believable before I hit the very middle of my twenties.

Tangelo: How much weight are you placing on your exact age? That you are twenty-five, and you have previously written about how becoming whichever age came next meant levelling-up, in some sort of way. That you should accomplish something new once you hit a new age. You must be terrified of twenty-six.

Me: This is why I can’t believe myself to be a man. A twenty-six-year-old should not look like this, should not write like this, should not sit in an office in the city and confess they are frustrated with the lack of their own progress, and they think their ideas—the real ones, not the creative ones—are flushed right out. But I know too there is no blueprint to “twenty-six”. I think I have said that for every single age since I was twenty.

Tangelo: And yet you still believe you should post these ramblings on self. Even after you edit them, even after you wonder whether anyone will read them, or if it matters if they do. When you posted your last two pieces, which combine into a sort of reality-television post-show babbling about the sort of people who would long to be on camera in perpetuity, you kept harassing yourself because it seemed “no one was reading them to completion.” Do you only write for other people?

Me: Of course I don’t. It’s a symptom of depression. You want people to connect with your art, with the contributions you have for the world, and you think those closest to you will automatically bend themselves to that. It isn’t reliable, it doesn’t make me feel any better.

            And I spend so much of my time fretting on my own life I can end up skipping over what other people do, too. Feeling bad for yourself makes you a hypocrite.

Hetty: Stop feeling bad for yourself. It is as simple as that, chicken.

Me: I preferred it when you had something more reassuring to say. The message hidden within, or a trait I have overlooked of myself. If I could remove a feeling from myself, maybe I could mythically give myself employment, too.

Tangelo: You keep turning around before you escape the Underworld.

Me: If I start to compare myself to Orpheus I know the insanity has surged out from within. I keep giving up when something becomes challenging, that is the truth—although the challenge for Orpheus was to believe his intuition was correct, that he was not being tricked, he was being tested, and that it was possible for Eurydice to be behind him in the line, walking the mile, and that it is possible to be successfully selected for the interview process, and successfully navigate an interview without slamming on a non-existent brake or trying to peer in a non-existent rearview mirror. Possible, then, to call yourself employed again.

Tangelo: Of course it is, bud.

Me: Don’t patronise me.

Tangelo: I would not dream of it.

Me: . . .

Tangelo: You no longer want to be a boy. You graduated out of that, I’m sure. You’re supposed to be, by the law of society, at this age, sorted in your life, or at least living in a tiny little apartment with a couple of roommates and a stable-enough source of income and maybe you go to trivia once a week or you have hiking buddies or whatnot. There is supposed to be a rhythm to your existence that you just simply cannot see while you wallow in unemployment. For months and months.

Me: All I really want now is to be able to afford a different lifestyle. Even if that lifestyle means I have less money, and more pressures to stay employed, and practically zero time to make appointments to go to the doctor, or get a haircut, or go to the post office when they fail to deliver a package. Even if that lifestyle means I fret about whether I like the work I am doing, or whether I can realistically ever see myself finishing the novel I dream about writing.

Tangelo: That is what normal looks like now. Living in some apartment, losing your money to rent, bills, and groceries. Finding the various hours in a week to be truly happy.

Me: Do you think I traded a version of sanity to have more free time?

Tangelo: Well, you wrote two extended works, both about one-hundred-and-twenty pages each. You travelled to Europe alone, which some may criticise because “you didn’t experience it with someone else”, although you believed you would never quite get the opportunity otherwise. To experience those three countries in Europe. You have spent countless hours finagling resumes, cover letters, applications, reactions to rejections, mental breakdowns. It’s the very end of July and how many films have you watched so far this year?

Me: 213.

Tangelo: The makings of someone truly with too much time on their hands. But it is also merely a number, and so is the number of rejection emails you have read.

Me: I want to be employed again because I want to fix myself up. The feat of that feels impossible.

Tangelo: It can’t be impossible, because it isn’t asking the world to suddenly shift to a permanent purple sky every waking day, or for someone previously-dead to come striding into your life to offer you their life’s wisdom. You want me to be sentimental: trying is a version of change. The change may for a time be small, less noticeable, but you can go from believing very little in yourself to believing a bit more. You seem pretty defeated to me, but you don’t seem like you’re giving up.

Me: I don’t want to give up.

Tangelo: Then don’t. Give yourself a day off, reminisce on how much you enjoyed your little vacation to Sydney, but mourn how the mood of it, the relaxed vibe, was shattered because the very next day after coming back you had to train your perky ass to an appointment with the employment agency. It made you sad. It made you pick at whatever the tiny bump on the edge of your palm is. You scratched and scratched at an itch that would not go away. That’s how you have felt for months now. I hear every word of it.

Me: Sometimes I like to picture myself in five years, as an exercise, not to imagine how successful I will be, or what position I might hold, but merely to imagine that I could be like those other people. Like friends who have apartments, and healthy relationships, and tell me stories about how in love with each other they are, but also how ordinary their lives are too. Shopping for new pillows, looking for the firmness they need. Buying something new at the grocery store and disliking it. I really just want to live a life that is that version of normal. Go to work, come home, not feel the burden of living the way I have done since I was an entirely different person pre-twenty. Sometimes I miss it. Hell, I miss it a lot, not being burdened by being older and having the wisdom to know at sixteen I had it easy. Sure, I was having mental breakdowns all the same, but if the breakdown was over feeling unprepared for an exam it is a lot more forgivable, in my own eyes, than collapsing at the hurdle of not being able to find a job again.

            If there was certainty and clarity that even at thirty-years-old I was living that entirely different life, and I could reach out and slip into the time-stream and wake up in that body, having escaped from the agonising work of applying, and reading a rejection email, and getting asked “well, what do you do for work?” by another stranger simply wanting to make conversation…I think the terrifying answer is maybe I would give away years of my life to be in a better situation. Because I am the patron saint of giving up when it becomes difficult, and it is now.

            Trying to rigorously structure your life around time is a problem—one of many—but soon it will have been a year of unsuccessfully trying to rebound from a brave but dangerous decision. To quit my job for my mental health. And as much as I pretend the first two months after leaving on the third of August do not count, they are still blanks of time on my resume.

            And that in itself has become a problem, in a string of problems, as I continue to navigate having not enough drive to know what I want in a career, and not enough energy to even write an entirely new cover letter every time, that someone may or may not read. I wouldn’t know.

            I create new excuses, like I create new characters to pretend to talk to. I keep trying because I think if I gave up entirely my parents would realise they ought to only have had one child. Which makes me miserable. It makes me cry. But they always say crying is healthy.

            Whoever they is.

            It is mortifying to tell someone I am unemployed, because I always worried it would be my future. But for now it is my present. It won’t always be my future. You have to have hope. You have to think of yourself as worthy. Yes, even worthy of getting a job again.

-          Keeley Young