I finally found someone to love–great guy. Â He’s willing to be with me warts and all, and yet my depression, problems with work, anxiety and PTSD symptoms are so bad that I can’t imagine he’d stay with me in the long term. Â We’ve been married for about a year and half.
My biggest struggle right now is work, but of course that’s affecting my new marriage in a huge way.
I suppose some would say I’m going through mid-life stuff, (I’m 42) but I’ve always struggled with work. Â I’ve tried everything I can do with my degrees (English and MFA Creative Writing), but have not found a sustainable way to support myself. Â I’ve been unemployed for the bulk of the time that we’ve been married as I came overseas to live with him (he’s British). Â Have not been able to find anything other than the few afternoons a week that I do really low-level admin stuff where he works.
I had a crap childhood (standard abuse, neglect, etc with accompanying mental hospital stays) but had always hoped for a life as an adult. Â The big disappointment was being on disability for 15 years and living in relative poverty while all my peers started careers. Â I couldn’t talk to anyone about why I was in disability since it was for mental health issues. Â I became totally isolated since things would fall apart on the “What do you do?” question. Â I didn’t do anything.
While I was able to pull myself out enough to get into graduate school, my degree is in fine arts and doesn’t provide a means to gainful employment. Â I couldn’t find anything else to study that I was good at. Â During my various periods of isolation (as a kid, while in hospitals, while on disability), I comforted myself by imagining being received by some community. Â After decades of searching far and wide, I still haven’t found my tribe. Â I’m very much a lone wolf, limping around the pack. Â Having such a bad experience in the UK was kind of the last straw for me.
Right now I’m so depressed I can’t motivate myself to do anything. Â We are moving back to the US (husband got a transfer since things have been so hellish in England with our housing, etc) in about 6 months, but to the NY area. Â I have just about zero knowledge of it and after total failure on my part in the last year to make a life and be productive, I’ve got zero confidence that I can do anything. Â I pretty much just feel useless, and after feeling so excited as a kid to grow up and have a life, just to be a professional basket case, I don’t know why I would stick around. Â I don’t think I am an asset to my husband in any way and just feel like I make his life much more complicated. Â I can’t stand the pain of being a loser anymore, especially when I’m around successful people. Â I don’t know how to explain myself, that I’ve done nothing. Â I was led to believe I had some talent in the writing arena, but then my work just got rejected and now I don’t have any faith that anyone would want to read anything I had to say. Â I survived my shit life by telling myself that I would use it, that I would make meaning out of it. Â What do I tell myself now–to just kill time for the next forty years…?
11 comments
If you aren’t an asset to your husband, if you feel you have nothing to offer him and that he won’t stay with you in the long term, tell me, why do you think he married you?
I was employed when we met. I don’t think he understood the extend of my health problems, even though I did disclose them.
Does he understand now?
He definitely realizes they’re worse than he thought. This is a pattern for me, so I gave him websites to look at about PTSD, etc, but love is blind, right?
He’s been married to you for one and a half years, presumably you were together a good while before that. The fact he is still with you, despite having learned the full extent of your condition should tell you something. He’s willing to support you, to move not just between countries but between continents with you. While I can’t profess to have any special insight into your situation, I would say without hesitation that he does love you, and that losing you really would affect him in a negative way.
Yes, I think it would be hard for him. I do not want to hurt him and yet I’m not sure that I can continue to face each day. I have one of those minds that needs to be occupied or it turns against me. (And btw we had dated less than a year and it was mostly virtual since we lived in separate countries.)
A question: I know you said your work was rejected, what did you write? And was it your first attempt?
Non-fiction (personal) essays and poems. A few of the latter were accepted and did fairly well but I’m really out the scene which requires some hobnobbing. About 95% of folks who get an MFA stop writing four years after their program because it doesn’t make any money and it’s hard to do in isolation.
I sent a lot of stuff out for about five years and a spattering after that (maybe three or four subs and a few for contests.) Had a few bad reading experiences where my stuff really bombed. I seem to have hit a total wall in terms of any belief in continuing it and yet I know that without expression, I’m worse than useless. If I’m not isolated, I can usually scrape up some belief to do it.
If you are writing for the sake of expression, as opposed to critical acclaim, then there really is nothing to stop you from expressing yourself.
I have to say, I don’t know much about the writing world, but from what I do know pretty much everyone has had some really critical responses to their work. (An old friend of mine lost all belief in himself after a few bad articles he wrote, and as far as I am aware he hasn’t written since)
I’m struggling to write this without sounding condescending or patronising, so I am really sorry if it sounds that way. I would feel like a hypocrite telling you not to do anything drastic, that life is so precious and all the churned out garbage you hear again and again, so I won’t say anything like that.
I’m just, I dunno, just trying to help in some way I guess..
@triedit
Don’t be a lame starving artist. Get yourself a job, manual labor or something. Work that’s hard, that you can go to everyday and collect a pay cheque. The artists struggle is finding time and energy to work on your passion. I get home from working in the mailroom everyday and I’ll work on my rhyming and recordings maybe one day out of the week. I was on the train an hour or so ago in the midst of a burst of inspiration. I wrote a bunch of verses on my way home and was psyched to get things going, but the urge just left me as I walked in the door.
Too tired from pushing papers around, doing errands for people, etc. I might not work on my creative stuff very often, but at least I’m fed and productive. Go do retail or something, keep busy for those hours during the day. The satisfaction that you’ll get from working on your writing even after a hard days work is unexplainable. life is work; you choose the work.
NR–thanks for responding. Yeah, it’s a very harsh world. I know a lot of people like your friend.
tphg–I’ve been trying to work. I’m overseas in the middle of nowhere and have had two interviews for jobs I’m very very very overqualified for. Got one, but couldn’t keep it since the buses weren’t reliable and I was always late. We agreed I had to go. I’ve driven a recycling truck, been a library clerk, a bookstore clerk, a clerk in a video store, a nanny, a waitress…. Right now I work two afternoons a week filing invoices. I have turned down zero work offers in the last year. In a few months I will be gone back to the US for a month and then looking for housing there/moving back, so the next 6 months will be mostly transition. I tried to volunteer as well but unless you’ve lived where I live, you probably wouldn’t get it. It’s a real shithole, and there is zero job movement. I moved here since my husband has a house here; it was where we had to live. Blah, blah blah….