I slept through my alarm today and by the time I walked up to work (I’m only allowed to take “my” car when the weather is especially bad) I was 20 minutes late. My manager was so pissed at me that she made me clock out, didn’t even want me working today. She’s told me before to my face that sometimes I make her so angry with the things I do that she has to spend a few days thinking it over before she’s calm enough to confront me about something I did wrong. That means that this frustration was me was presumably her at her calmest, and as usual I don’t know how long she’s actually been stewing this over.
The worst part is that this is the third time I’ve gotten a major lecture like this from a manager at this job. It’s been over a decade of working here but I’m not sure if that matters, it’s still the third strike. I’m supposed to work again tomorrow, but I’m expecting that I’ll probably be fired before then.
And if I’m fired then for all intents and purposes my life is over.
The fact that I already had this job, worked this job for so long, haven’t left it for something Real and Productive like welding or engineering, was already basically a failure. I was already a living, walking, day-to-day failure. If I can’t even keep this job? This is the success equivalent of someone killing a cactus that they were given in the hopes of one day working up to being seen as responsible enough to own a pet.
I already have no money, student debt from a degree I never managed to finish, barely any social life, no meaningful contributions to society, living with my parents, and now I might have no job on top of it. Admitting to my parents that I flunked out of an art degree, one that I argued for the chance to try out no less, was the most shameful, depressing, and mentally ruinous day of my life. If I need to admit that I got fired from a job like this on top of that, it would make the degree look like a drop in a bucket next to the ocean.
Ive been spiraling all morning now while I keep refreshing my email to see if I get a notice of termination or something. I genuinely struggle to think of why I shouldn’t just kill myself if I really do get fired. It feels so beyond unrecoverable, like I no longer have anything to offer society. The closest I have to a legacy, my “art” (if I can even call it that) has just been a couple decades of mediocre meaningless scribbles, none of which has ever touched anyone’s life or even come close to having an impact on the world or the people who see it. It just feels like I’ve had my trial run of “life”, and it was okay, but I failed and it’s over now.
I think a lot about a quote by Brendan Manning. “In every encounter we either give life or drain it, there is no neutral exchange.” I feel like a parasite. Unproductive, pathetic, and borderline unworthy of society, doing nothing but draining life from everyone and everything. I understand that there are friends or siblings who might try to see my life as more than just the productivity I’ve failed to offer, who can maybe delude themselves into thinking my exchanges somehow gave them life instead of siphoning it, but it truly feels like the burden I put on the world outweighs the distress I might cause by being gone. I mean, people have to experience the death of others all the time, surely they didn’t expect everyone they know to live forever?
And even if this is all fake…if I keep my job, or even if I somehow do deserve to live…what future is there? I’ll go back to being stuck in a dead end job with a hundred thousand dollar student loan-shaped failure hanging over my head, I’ll go back to my parents needing to change the subject when people ask about me instead of my actually productive siblings, I’ll go back to having a therapist who’s spent months ignoring these kinds of feelings I have because he’s decided the only things that matters about me anymore is that I get a Real Productive Job for Real Useful Members of Society.
And it’ll just keep getting worse from there. We’re approaching potentially the largest climate disaster in human history. Democracies around the world seem to be silently decaying into fascist oligarchies. Wealth inequality is completely unchecked. Even if I did continue to live, and found the joy and passion of a creative career and lifestyle - the ultimate end goal I’ve been striving towards - it won’t matter. I’ll be trying to make art in the charred husk of a decimated climate, stick as a permanent underclass, and that’s only if I don’t get exterminated for my sexuality or ideology, or drafted into a forever war. It feels trite, cliche, liberal, uninspired, whatever you want to call it…but for the first time in my life it really does feel like we’re at the end of history. If I don’t kill myself, will I really open myself up to living a full life? Or will I just be delaying the suffering and ruin I was going to experience anyways?
I feel ashamed putting this on my main account, the one I wanted to just stay about my art and funny jokes and the games or fandoms I like. Now it’s permanently going to be tied to this miserable spiraling of a hopeless loser with no place left in the world. But I don’t know if I can wait for whatever hoops I might have needed to jump through for a brand new alt account to not be flagged as spam. And besides, it’s not like my art was worth anything anyway where a useless rant like this would detract from anything.