I’m super depressed today. Half of it is because I’m tired. The other half is because I’ve just been told by someone whose opinion I value that I’m wasted in my job. That I should and could be doing something better. That even collecting employment insurance benefits would be better, because at least then I’d have time, energy and resources enough to start pursuing my own career path, a more creative and fulfilling one.

Now, I normally keep job talk out of here. For one, if I have gripes with someone or something at work, I either bring it up with them or let it go, and I don’t consider it fair to discuss work in a forum where work can’t defend itself; not to mention, I do feel loyal enough to the people who pay my bills not to talk smack behind their backs. Y’know? For two, work is work and life is life, and one really doesn’t have much to do with the other. This is my life; work is where I go to make money by doing what I’m told to do for eight hours every day.

However, I’m at a point where work has begun affecting my life; and so I am at a point where I am going to talk about work because I can’t leave it at the office anymore, and yet I still don’t wish to talk smack. I guess I’ll feel better by saying that it’s not the job itself, per se; it’s that I have tired of the monotony; that I need more opportunity to be creative; that I don’t feel challenged; that all of this has always been true, but it’s been four years now, and it’s getting harder to deal with, and I’m at a point in my life where I want to feel fulfilled and satisfied in a job well done, and I haven’t felt that way in a long, long time - probably since the last time I finished up my last website. Maybe that’s the problem - I used to get the creativity and fulfillment I needed elsewhere, but since that outside source has dried up, I’m feeling the Cubicle Drudge much more acutely.

Even if that’s the case, there have also been many changes in the past week or so, and though for a while it was great, it’s taken a turn for the worse again. I’m feeling stifled and controlled. It’s a fine job - I just no longer fit into it well anymore. The best example I have to give of the changes is that I now have had to go back to a 9-5 schedule. I’m sure everyone here has seen how tired I get, and how badly I sleep, and maybe even some of you have noticed that I haven’t been complaining as much lately. Well, that’s because after a couple of years of going to work for 10am, my body finally got used to it. For the past 8-10 months or so, I’ve been sleeping. I can crawl into bed by 11pm and have had enough sleep by 8.45am that my eyes pop open by themselves. I’m rested, for once in my life - and now it has suddenly been thrust upon me that I have to be at work by 9am.

I told them I’m terrified that I’ll be constantly late (I was always late before the switch to 10-6; in this job, in high school, in every other job I’ve had), that I’ll be persistently tired and therefore unproductive, and that they’ll fire my ass. They laughed it off. Everyone laughs off my sleep problems. No one has ever seemed to understand how serious insomnia is. I simply do not and can not fall asleep quickly, easily, or early. I can’t just go to bed an hour earlier because I have to get up an hour earlier. I mean, I go to bed an hour early, but I just lie there, tossing and turning, until my body is ready to sleep. And in the morning, instead of waking rested by myself, I wake deliriously to the alarm. For the past six months, I haven’t even heard my alarm 80% of the time, because I wake up and turn it off. The alarm makes me clinically insane, I’m sure of it.

Yet here I am. Last week I had flu, and had to go to work through most of it for fear of not being able to afford rent this month; by Saturday, I couldn’t stay out of bed. Every time I got up, I felt weak and tired and had to crawl back in. I’m pretty sure it was my body rebelling against my going to work with a fever three days in a row, but what could I do?

The design parts of my job have dried up; they keep going to outside sources, spending tons of money and then asking my opinion of what has been done and making them change things. Our websites, even though there are five, need little to no work. I spend a lot of time finding flaws in office efficiency and creating new ways to do things, just to have something interesting to do in between correcting tests (and inefficiency offends me). Due to a marketing blitz, we have a ton of new 3D and Web students, but it’ll be weeks before they get through the basics of their programs and get to me in order for me to mark more creative assignments. Most of my day is spent correcting true/false or multiple choice tests, or doing administrative things. One new part of my job, for instance, is to check on people’s student loans and update our financial spreadsheet. Um? The fuck? What part of “new media instructor” says "spreadsheet” to you?

But I digress. Suffice it to say that there isn’t much creative for me to be doing around there. It’s making me tired.

Where am I going with this? Oh right. Wasted in this job. I believe that; I can and should be doing so much more. But I don’t know how to do those things without leaving my island. And now that Kevin and I are moving in together (soon), I feel pressure on myself to keep my part of the bargain up: right now, he and I are about par in the Earnings department. Even if I could find something around here that suited me, there’s no way it would pay what I am earning now. I do not like the idea of becoming a burden on him; I like that we’re equal and I want it to stay that way.

If this job were to disappear, I could get EI, sure, but at 55% of what I’m making; I spend 75% of my paycheck on bills. I may not be smart in math, but I know that even if I didn’t eat, on EI alone I’d be fucked.

Which brings me to making money on the side. This is something I should be doing anyway. For a while, I had it great; Weldon threw a few grand worth of contracts my way every year. But the design business is in a slump, and he barely makes it by on his own these days. I don’t seem able to create / manufacture enough jewellery to make a go of it; or perhaps I just don’t know how to market myself, I’m not sure.

I don’t know what to do, or how to do it.

It feels like a life change is coming, and I am completely unprepared. It’s scary.

What’s even scarier is the thought that the change is going to pass by me completely, and that I’m trapped.