Hello? Anybody there?

Probably not, given the way I’ve been neglecting this place lately. Sorry about that, kids. If by some chance any Loyal Readers are still out there lurking in the dark after all this time, my sincerest apologies for disappearing on you. Blame the usual culprit: My day job has entered into another of those periodic cycles of soul-crushing, nonstop activity that seems to eat up my entire existence. I haven’t had to work any super-late nights recently, and for that I’m grateful. But even with that small boon, my days have been overstuffed and hectic, busy from the moment I hit the office until the moment I leave at night. I’ve been eating lunch at my desk and not taking breaks so I can get everything done in time to escape by six, but these extraordinary efforts don’t seem to make much of a dent; my in-box remains magically full no matter how quickly or selflessly I work, like some fiendish horn of plenty. Also, there’s been an iron slug of urgency hanging over every minute of every day because it’s all due yesterday, and if all that isn’t stressful enough, I’ve found myself fighting tooth-and-nail over such earth-shattering minutiae as whether or not it’s correct to put a period at the end of a sentence that ends in a URL. God, I hate it when it gets like this. A little busy stretch here and there is one thing, but when it’s sustained day after day for weeks on end…

I don’t think people who’ve never worked in advertising can fully grasp just how all-consuming — not to mention totally draining — this industry truly is. I certainly didn’t before I experienced it myself. It’s not that I dislike my job — no, really, I don’t, in spite of all the griping — so much as I hate not having the juice for anything but my job. Most nights, I don’t get home until after seven, so it’s not like I have much free time anyway, but when I do manage to carve out an hour for the things I want to do, well… I just don’t have much left to give them. I’ve tried to write, both fiction and blog content, but the words won’t come. I try to read, and I keep having to page back to remind myself of what’s going on. I put on a DVD and find myself dozing after five or ten minutes, so I have to rewind and try again, just like I do with the book. And it doesn’t help
that the sense of urgency I mentioned has started following me home, making me feel, no matter what I’m up to, that I don’t really have time to be wasting on this activity, that I ought to be doing something else that’s more important. Not that I know what that other thing is supposed to be, of course.

I feel like I’ve lost the connection to some of the deepest parts of my identity: whatever talents I have as a writer, my literary and cinematic interests, my curiosity, hell, my sense of enjoyment. Not being able to do the things I enjoy and by which I’ve always defined myself is generating tremendous anxiety for me. It’s immensely frustrating for me to be in this place. I feel like all I do anymore is work, commute, and sleep, and that kind of treadmill existence gets to me very quickly. Contrary to what a couple of my friends seem to believe, I’m no slacker… but no one will ever mistake me for a workaholic, either. Life isn’t supposed to be like this. Well, my life isn’t anyway.

Maybe it’s my fault. Maybe I just don’t have what it takes to push through the mental haze and accomplish the things I think I want to do. But in talking to friends who do similar work, I really don’t think it’s just me. We all seem to have the same complaints, the same frustrations. The day job that was supposed to support us while we did our “real work,” whatever that may be — creative writing, art, music, some kind of craft, or just having a good life that’s about something other than the thing that earns us our living — has instead come to dominate and define our identities. Against all our wishes and best efforts, we’ve been assimilated. We’ve become drab little cogs in the infernal machine. And it’s destroying us, hollowing us out in tiny little spoonfuls of glittery dust that gets cast to the wind, never to come back.

Now, I know I’ve made all these complaints before. And I realize as well that many people — maybe even most people — have frustrating, time-consuming, unfulfilling jobs. I also know that I’m lucky to even have a job, the way things are these days. I feel guilty and self-centered for writing this, as if I have no right to complain. And I suppose from some perspectives, I don’t. But knowing other people have problems too is small consolation when you’re staring at the ceiling in the quiet hours after midnight, too wound up to sleep and too wrung out to do anything else, wondering when, exactly, your dreams started to die, and you’re horrified to realize you no longer remember exactly what those dreams even were, and worst of all, you feel like you’re failing the one test everyone wants to ace: life itself.

I never have handled failure well. I once had a complete meltdown because I got a B-minus in my eighth-grade science class. A B-minus put me in tears, can you believe that? I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I’ve been on the verge of tears a few times this week, too…