I am unwell. Work has been stressing me out lately, and I’m not handling it correctly. One of the core management principles at my workplace is “resilience”; actually I just recently went on about my do-or-die doggedness in my year-end personal review. But truthfully I am exhausted and I just want it to be over.

How many times have I found myself here? Everything just went so off the fucking rails in 2013 when I left Dick’s Last Resort. I shouldn’t have done that. I was depressed and I thought that changing jobs and making an extra $1500 a year would magically fix everything, but all it did was throw my entire life into a horrific tailspin in which I’m still spiralling downward. Every decision I make now to correct the course is laced with self-loathing as I recognize I’m only trying to clean up from the wreckage of my own Kaiju.

Wanting to run away from work says more about me than it does about the job. We’ve lost a lot of team members recently so we’re perpetually understaffed, making every shift incredibly difficult. I have to work hard every day I am there, which shouldn’t be a reason someone quits a job. Conversely, it’s kind of what a job is, essentially: hard work. We’re trying to hire on more staff but they accept the job and then work one day with our current team members who are all exhausted and at their wits’ end and think “Is this what working here does to a person? Fuck this!”

And we never see them again.

When I was younger I wanted to be a teacher. There were three motivating factors: knowledge, good teachers I’d had in the past, and bad teachers I’d had in the past. I saw teaching as the most reverent position one could hold in our society, and I genuinely wanted to be that person. To carry on the good I’d seen done and atone for the bad.

As it happened, I sort of fell into restaurant management. Kind of the same thing, except not, and none of the pride or satisfaction comes along with it. However, I did approach it in the same way that I approached wanting to teach: learn as much as I can, honor the teaching styles I appreciated and steer clear from the missteps and transgressions I’d seen in the past.

So imagine my disappointment when someone at work quit because of me. I leaned on them too hard, worked them too often, didn’t tend to their needs adequately. I took it hard. Which, of course, made me want to run away.

But running away isn’t the answer. It hasn’t been for years. I left Dick’s to go to BWW and hated it, leaving after a year. Dick’s took me back as a bartender but by that point the failure had set into my bones and augmented the depression and I couldn’t sustain it. I drank myself stupid and stopped caring about anything other than being drunk and numb, and was late to work one too many times, getting myself fired. I waited tables at Chili’s for a while, and I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t a living, and I continued to spend all my money on liquor and distractions. Fred’s came calling and that was okay, but I found myself discouraged by how intense the work often was, and got exhausted and just wanted it to be over.

So we moved here and I’ve been at my current company for almost a year now, so of course I hate it and want it to be over. This is not a life. If anything, this should be all the evidence I need to discern a pattern. To look at all the facts laid out on this screen and see the truth:

It’s not you; it’s me.

The hardest part of this realization is the responsibility. Okay, it’s me; now what? The most obvious solution to all this brow-beating is “Grin and Bear It”, but that’s not comforting in the slightest. So I’ve been looking for side gigs to parlay into a life outside the corporate box, but it’s hard to give them an honest go when you’ve just come to the conclusion that you’re a self-poisoning piece of shit. Hard to believe I deserve to follow my passions when I can’t even make peace with working hard enough to pay my bills.

So, in the mean time…