<font color="purple">Sleep is my friend.</font> I don’t know how I got to this place. Just a month ago, I felt inspired about getting into real estate investing; now it seems quite impossible. I thought I could get a small communication/business writing career launched, and today the idea of having those business cards seems silly.

I feel like a loser beyond words.

<font color="red">This is not a suicide threat.</font> It’s just me feeling low and hopeless and helpless:
I have started thinking anew about killing myself. About buying a grill and letting the carbon monoxide get me. My new medications doc, Henderson, asked if I wanted Librium, but I said that was a favorite mixer with booze and I’d had some near misses. Could be too tempting, I said. Hah! Just having the word “Librium” put into my consciousness – haven’t thought of this in years! -- has set the cogwheels going. It’s always been so easy to get Librium. I can see now that I can probably just go to some doc, like I used to do: drink coffee for jitters, pull an all-nighter to look haggard, whine about how tough life is. Even a limited 30-pill scrip could do the job. Heck, I just had a guy whose specializes in meds offer me some. Last time I drank tequila, I had an alcoholic seizure, so with the pills, should do the job.

<font color="purple">Here’s all the things I’ve failed at:</font>

1. At my university, out of roughly 60-100 people who go up for tenure every year, 0-2 don’t get it. I was in that teeny, tiny minority of losers who didn’t get it.

2. I’ve written three books; sold none. Last one was rejected by 50 publishers and 30 agents. I’m working on another – paid good money to get hooked up with the kind of agents who don’t need to advertise because they are so good at what they do, they don’t want every wannabe writer who reads Writer’s Digest or a website bothering them.

I have a proposal, and sample chapters – I’m afraid to put them out there.

3. I apply for jobs at newspapers where I would take a 40%-60% pay cut. I don’t have recent clips, which the big guys want. I’ve been teaching journalism – my gosh, doesn’t that count? And no one calls me.

4. I’ve had ONE interview since I started applying for work in February. Another company let me stop in to learn more about what they do – not a real “interview” but I really wanted the job after I fully understood what I’d be doing, asked for it, and they said “Nope.”

4. I don’t try to freelance to get recent clips. My friend tried to hook me up with the editor/owner of the local St. Augustine newspaper so I could get some clips while I was pet-sitting for her – and I did nothing.

5. One small newspaper that is part of a large chain I respect, in a small town in Florida that I like a lot, asked said my resume was impressive – asked for clips – and never answered any emails after that. I was so jazzed I went to the city twice to look at homes. I even created a proposal about what I might be able to do for them. Some of the members of a writing class I was in critiqued it – it was good, sensible, supportive suggestions for improvement – and I just gave up after that. So I have a bunch of research, an 80 percent finished website, a half-finished PowerPoint proposal – and that’s it.

6. I thought I might try to start a freelance business writing consulting here in New Orleans, got jazzed, printed cards, found the available free websites too hard to use with their templates, gave up.

7. Yesterday, I tried to use to the Daily Schedule of Activities suggested in Feeling Good Handbook, that my new T says we’re going to use. (Have missed 2 weeks due to my extra long hurricane evacuation to Texas.) I didn’t do most of them. Evil thoughts negated what I did do.

8. Tried the “talking back” to negative thoughts written exercise. It was momentarily stimulating. Then, whap, back into hopelessness, helplessness, lethargy/fatigue.

9. Oh, yeah, and the man I thought was an angel for 15 years and the best person I ever knew abandoned me after I lost my job and was diagnosed with lupus because he said, “You’re so filled with hate and anger and bitterness that I can’t go out with you in public anymore.” He thinks I am impolite to incompetent salespeople (not all of them – just those that bother me telling me what a great deal something is but know nothing about their products ) and wait staff (whom I have the audacity to ask to bring little things like sugar for tea a second time if they forget it the first time; I do NOT yell at anyone, I say please, but he was extremely passive about such things).

Don’t feel like talking to anyone. I think it’s a nice day outside. Hard to tell in this dark apartment. I’ll go out to get the Sunday paper soon, so I can look at jobs no one will hire me and homes I can’t afford.

I get these little spurts of feeling jazzed about something, or even a tiny bit hopeful – not nearly up enough to be a bipolar “high” – more like climbing back to a hopefully normal hopeful way of thinking – and then, poof, it vanishes. Back down and even lower with each failure. Awk, it seems I can’t even use the cognitive psychology techniques to feel better.

So you can see from this list that I am not just imagining a past of failure – it is there. And life hurts so much I can’t hardly stand it. And I am making it worse by inaction and isolation