What I think about after a bad night's sleep

Greetings

When the work first ran dry last spring, my first idea was not to write a novel, that took a week to ferment before I found the idea worth taking on.  No my first notion stemmed from having read too many bike blogs. I had started falling in love with the new(old) gadget of the cargo bike. The day dream was to sink a bunch of my capital into one and go about town moving stuff not big enough for a car but too big for a normal bike.  I even had a bike in mind but as is typical for me I had idea but none of the smaller ideas I needed to hold it up, let alone the willingness sink so much money into things.

This week has seen me short on sleep. I had an interview on Tuesday I await news from that.  I was lucky to even make it there without looking like a drooling idiot.  Thanks to having woken up some time between 3 and 4 in the morning and never regaining sleep.  I gave the best I had, no word on whether it was anywhere near enough.  Of the jobs I have interviewed for it was the one I was most qualified for, this is both a good and a bad thing.  Good because I have a chance at getting it bad because I am not sure how much I want it.

The sunk cost fallacy comes to mind whenever I think about the work I have done and the work I am seeking.  The flawed logic is, I have done this work before, therefore I am qualified, therefore I want more of this work.  Yes I want work, and yes I am more likely to apply for jobs similar to what I had taken on, because I have a chance.  Yet I doubt my own seriousness.  These days I doubt most things about myself.

It is worse on days when I have slept badly but it does not go away on the good days.  The self doubt and dread, the lack of vision, the struggle to plan out a day with more than three points on a checklist.  It gets worse as I spend more time away from the working world.  There is of course the shame of being out of work which only gets worse over time, yet it feels like that is the least of my emotions.  Perhaps because I never get there.  No I skip over that one and head straight for the bottom, where my urge to hide in a quiet dark corner starts to dominate.  So much of what I find myself doing is trying to keep myself out of that corner.  It works most days of the week.

I get out of the warm dark corner, but I don't leave the room.  It gets harder to do the hard things that will make life better, maintaining a better mood is much of what I do.  Earlier this morning I made a facebook status it read. Today I am tired and bitter.  Several comments were made to it, my final comment was my good moods are thin and brittle.

Good moods thin and brittle.  I have been using that language internally for some time.  It is sneaky, a slow inversion of my internal dialog, where usually the negative has the exceptional qualities.


So what happened to the bike schlepping idea, I asked how would I get customers, I answered I don't know and got scared away.

So now I wait for news if I get the second interview.  If I do I might write something shorter, cheerful and less rambling but for today this is my thought process.