Sorry this is incredibly long.

I know I have a problem, I know I’m anxious and depressed, and the last two years (and however many more there will be with our world feeling like it’s upended every other month) have made things harder, sharper, more harsh. It’s made everything worse.

I feel like I’m in a similar situation to a lot of people, but it also feels so individual that nobody else would understand it, and if they did, they would say I’m just not looking at the situation in the right way.

I grew up in a stable middle-class family in the Midwest, went to a perfectly acceptable college, and after graduating in late 2008 and seeing the world and my job prospects fall apart in front of me, I found myself in jobs to kinda just keep things going. I worked at a call center, got myself up to a manager position there with plans to move to New York City after saving up some money.

In 2011, I tried New York City and failed miserably. I stayed with a friend during the time and know I ran out all my good will with them, so much so that I haven’t talked to them in almost 10 years at this point. I’m sure I’ll never talk to them again.

After coming back home in 2012, I once again found myself in jobs to just get along. One of them was absolutely horrendously horrible and left me in the worst physical health of my life. I quit that job and went to a better job, again at a fucking call center because that’s apparently the only thing I have any skill at.

Things went alright at that job, but the pay was low (of course it was) and the prospects for growth were nil. I also had to work with a bunch of townie fucking idiots who I couldn’t relate to for the most part, or didn’t want to relate to.

I tried learning graphic design and coding to vaguely ‘make websites’, didn’t get too far on that because I couldn’t really keep up with the way there was a new tool to build things every other week.

Then, an opportunity was presented to me that I thought would change it all. A friend told me about a new graduate program starting at the school I graduated from. It was sort of like a program focusing on User Experience (though not called that so of course now I can’t put that I have a Master’s Degree in UX) and would involve a lot of the creative, multimedia things that I had dabbled in over the years and would be an amazing opportunity.

Feeling stuck where I was, I decided to apply, and when I got in I was elated. Things felt like they were moving in the right direction.

The first year and three quarters of my graduate program, things were actually good. I felt good, empowered, and was working alongside people that I genuinely enjoyed being around. I learned a ton about UX, graphic design, and a whole lot of topics. I went to conferences, even spoke at one, as I wrote my thesis on video games, I even got to take a trip to a pre-Fortnite Epic Games (this was like a couple months before Fortnite got big).

Things were going great, I thought. One of the professors was this brash guy who essentially promised us the world, said we’d have no problem finding jobs in our fields, and that he would help us in the post-graduation process.

...until, about 3 months from my graduation, he had a relapse of alcoholism, disappeared from work, didn’t speak to me aside from an email he sent the whole program on the day of our graduation. He just completely abandoned us (and, of course, took a job at a more prestigious university almost right away, because people like that always seem to fail upward).

But, even after this, I didn’t want to just give up. I’d worked incredibly hard to get my Master’s Degree (along with the $40,000 in student loans I’d racked up, something I was told would be easy to pay off when I’m in a 6-figure UX job) and I wanted to make this work.

I’ve always been a hesitant, anxious person for the most part, but in grad school, I really tried to break out of that and, borrowing a line from Neon Genesis Evangelion, I decided to get in the fucking robot...I went to mixers where I felt uncomfortable but made it a point to interact with people, went to industry meetups in my area, socialized, stayed in contact, followed up...essentially did all the things that I was uncomfortable with but knew I had to do in order to make connections.

And doing all of that, working for months to try to get a job in the UX field, using all the connections I had, meeting with other charlitains who acted like they had this big opportunity lined up only to find that there was nothing there, I finally just had to get *something*, because finances were running low.

After a little about 90 day jaunt at a coffee shop where I was having panic attacks every day at work, I was fired and was told by the owner that the other employees said that having me there was worse than not having a person at all (that’s a direct quote, not depression brain editorializing...whether the other employees said that, I don’t know, but the owner said those words), I found myself at a job managing a...have you been following along?... fucking call center!

The pay was better than what I’d been earning before, still about $20,000/year less than I was expecting with my expensive degree.

For the first couple pre-pandemic years, things were alright. I did feel like I was doing a good job managing the department, and it felt like there was a path for regular raises, maybe a title change that would net more money, and just general room to move.

The pandemic hit, of course, but things seemed alright at first. I got to work from home, which was great, as I have about an hour commute to work, which fucking sucks.

But those raises haven’t come. And they keep laying more and more responsibilities at my departments’ feet, and it just keeps feeling more frantic, more busy, and more crushing.

So that’s where I am now. I’m more depressed than I’ve ever been in my life. I’m on antidepressants and they do some, but they aren’t keeping up. 

I want to make a change in my life, but I feel like every time I try to do that, nothing happens, or I’m worse off at the end of it than when I started. 

I’m also so depressed that I’m just trying to mentally keep my head above water. That makes it nearly fucking impossible to do things to better myself when I always feel so beat down every day and sucked of energy.

I don’t know what I can do to make things better. I feel like it’s just this, forever, and no change will come. 

I don’t even know why I’m posting this here, but, I feel like I just need to talk about it in some way.