It's the story of my life. You all know it too: get high and energetic, take on the world, make promises that can't be kept, then crash and burn.

This time I REALLY screwed the pooch. I interviewed for a state government position (evaluating patient care in nursing homes) during my most recent hypomanic episode. This was before I ramped up into the mania that really turned my brain inside out (I never hallucinated before). I was so freaking high this time that I went in there and turned the interview around on them---I was actually interviewing them!

That's when I found out that the job entails lots of long, irregular hours, traveling all over the state (and sometimes literally on a few hours' notice), nights, and erratic schedules. JUST what someone as unstable as I am really needs.

Now I have to turn the job down because I've indeed crashed and burned, and it's unleashed all these horrible, self-demeaning thoughts about what the hell was I THINKING??!!! How the hell could someone like me EVER hope to be successful when I'm such a mess?? My anxiety went ape**** just thinking about being hours or half a day's drive from home, slogging through a 14- or 16-hour day, having to go back and do it all again the next day, people expecting me to be able to keep up.......

And now of course I'm in the dumps because reality has bitten me in the arse and I have the horrible feeling that I will never be more than what I am now, a nurse in name only who scrubs along at an old nursing home because that's the only thing I can handle anymore. I'm broken inside and there's no fix.