Head Start Crisis
I assume that my feeling of melancholy and hopelessness is a result of my surgery. A little bit of moody depression is common after someone has played ping pong with your ovaries.
Either that, or I'm experiencing as much of my mid-life crisis as I can, since I have never expected to live past 40 or 50. I think I'm past mid-life in that case...you know, it's hard to pinpoint midlife when the end keeps getting moved beyond expectations.
I gave up my dreams and became jaded and dissatisfied with my life when I was 20 years old. That was the last straw for me. My father had been killing my dreams for years with that parental blather about how I'd never amount to anything if I majored in English, or that I would be broke and miserable--not to mention, wasting the God-given gift of intelligence--if I tried to be an author, journalist, radio personality, or teacher. These are all things that I wanted to do when I was in high school.
Granted, I would most likely be poor if I tried to hitch my wagon to any of those stars. The last nail in the coffin came from a local radio morning show host. I had gotten to know the guy on a personal basis, outside of the studio. He was fairly bitter and angry, having lost a long-time job because he was going through treatment for testicular cancer. (He got the job back, and is well-adjusted and working there, still. I think they might even be #1 in this market.) He told me to stay as far away from radio as I could. He said it's a terrible, back-stabbing, low-paying business.
I was majoring in communications, so that revelation pretty much screwed me. I never regained direction in life.
I'm nothing, now. I am not really an adult because I don't have kids, I don't have a house, and I work in an office full of cubicles and people who have high school educations. I don't feel responsible or grown-up. I'm that same douche bag 20-something in the shitty cluttered apartment with the bottom-of-the-line car and bad credit.
I have an AA, BSIT, MIS and fuck all to show for them aside from the student loans. I can't work in IT. I don't have any certifications or programming skills. I can't develop an application or manage an Oracle implementation. I can't administer a full SQL database with triggers and replication and ACID-compliant transactions. I forget more of the programming I learned with each passing day. I'm a moron.
Now I've spent years getting a half-assed education that helps me not one bit. So, I'm old and useless with little chance of getting out of this shitty situation. My peers are well-established doctors, lawyers, and officers of corporations. Christ, even the kids I used to babysit are doing real things with their careers. I'm a failure.
When I die, the few people who know me will know that I wasted a lifetime, waiting for my life to start.