Not really sure if this is allowed, so any mod can delete this, just want to shout at the void for a few minutes.
I don't like where my life is heading. I feel stuck. I'm about halfway to traditional retirement age, and have so little to show for it. I feel tired. I feel on the brink of burning out.
At the same time, I have so much going well in my life. Late last year, I bought a house. My dream place in many ways - if you met me 10 years ago, I would have said I want a pent house in the middle of a big city. That phase faded, and I realized a more recent desire; a small-ish place with a big yard in the middle of nowhere. The only neighbor I can see has 1000 some-odd acres for cows and farmland, but even that is mostly hidden by forest. The only sounds I hear are birds in the trees, my chickens clucking, my dogs playing... It's so serene. It's also a lot of work, but so far, I take solace in the chores of keeping up with everything.
But I also feel like I have no time. I have a job that pays too little, that used to bring me some sort of meaning, but the higher-ups moved me to a new group where the clients aren't as... shall we say, appreciative. My job went from a feeling of making a difference to feeling like a butler. This will also be the sixth summer where there's no opportunity for me to take any sort of vacation.
I just want a week. One week of no work, not so I can sit around and do nothing, no, I have so much I want to do that I don't have time for.
I also have zero desire to work in this sector for the rest of my life. I spent, or what I feel more and more, wasted, five years of my life getting a masters degree in music. At the risk of sounding egotistical, I'm a pretty good musician. It's the one thing in my life I've always felt good at.
And I got really lucky, I graduated with my masters about a year ago. Worked all summer at this dead-end job, and got an offer to teach music theory at one of the top schools in the country. However, it wasn't meant to last - the teacher I was replacing was on sebatical for one term, but the headmaster said if there's space for me, and things go well for me, they'll try to make it work.
Well it did go well, well enough that my students actually wrote to the headmaster requesting for me to stay. Alas, the original teacher came back from his sebatical, and there was no space for me. So I return to my dead-end job.
It feels almost cruel, that I get a small taste of a "real career", something that I can see myself doing forever, something I really enjoyed, just to be thrown back into what was normally summer work, now full-time. And subsequently getting moved to a group that I enjoy even less than the one I had come to know over five years.
Unfortunately, many schools have been forced to cut budgets, so my prospects of getting another teaching job right now are very slim.
So it feels as if my life right now will continue indefinitely.
Which I hate.
I don't want to work where I work. But I have no qualifications to apply for a job I might find more fulfilling, and the kind of work I am qualified for isn't looking for anyone.
At the same time, I know that, in all likelihood, this won't actually be the rest of my life. I'll find a better job, I'll find something I'll be happy with. But right now, that feels so far away, so vague and so unreachable that I almost can't imagine my life being any different than what it is right now.
And it's so tiring.
Part of me wants to call in sick for a week, just so I can do other things that I want to do, but I also can't afford docking my pay a week. So I show up, feign a smile, do everything these people want, go home, do as much as I am able to that makes me happy, and go to bed exhausted with just enough time to sleep to have enough energy to do it all again the next day.
I have several side-projects that I work on in my free time, which I truly belive could one day bring in enough money to live off of, but I don't have enough free time right now to get them off the ground. Part of me wishes I had six months of savings in the bank so I could tell work to get bent and focus on myself and what I want. But, being recently graduated, I don't have that luxury. So I'll just keep plodding along indefinitely, trying to keep my ultimate goals in my mind to get me through my work days.
As I said earlier, I just feel tired, stressed, exhausted, and like om burning out. I don't want to do anything, yet I want to do too many things. The year is half over, and so much has happened, yet so little has happened in terms of achieving my overall goals. So much to do, so little time.
I'm not really looking for advice, or a pep talk, or empathy. It just makes me feel better to type this out and know that my inner monologue exists somewhere out in the real world. If anybody actually read this, thank you.