Feeling Optionless

What do you do in life when you feel optionless?

I'd like to say it is depression but I suspect it represents more than that.  Depression I know in its various forms and fashions from years of being neighbors.  This seems different.

When did it start?  Good question.  I'd almost tie it to the end of last month, when a combination of factors occurred.  The first was that an interview - the fifteenth or twentieth over a three year period - went nowhere.  The second was the loss of 20% of my staff.

The interview thing matters because one cannot really go somewhere else until one successfully passes an interview.  And after fifteen or twenty unsuccessful interviews (in some cases which are not filled) one begins to wonder if there is something intrinsically wrong with one's self - and if there is any hope of improving what one is.

The second - the 20% staff loss - has been a steadily rising wave.  The tasks that have come from this loss are significant and seem overwhelming when viewed against the background of the list of tasks that I already am responsible for.  And if I try and make progress over here, I lose it over there.

I tried to compensate for it the first week by working a great number hours.  It worked - for about 3 days.  Then my productivity went down considerably and I ended up accomplishing less in the last two, making things even out as if I had worked normally.

The result of all this?  A sense that there is nothing that can be changed.  Every minor success is tinged by the thought that there is so much left to do.  And even if I do succeed, what of that?  The larger picture is that, at least right now, it feels that there is little impact in what I do - and that what I am doing will not transfer into any kind of greater opportunity for myself.

The biggest problem is that I find that it weighs mentally and physically on me as well.  I'm tired much more, needing to regularize my sleep patterns to the point I seem to have less time to do other things.  And even for those things - things that I like and enjoy doing - I find less energy and dedication in doing them.

I am not sure what to do with all of this.  All I do know is that I find it harder and harder to be motivated about anything.  The sense of having options, of other things that I could or would do, has been quietly slipping away, leaving nothing but a mental landscape which is flat and dry and windswept.

Is it an abandonment of hope? I do not know that I could say.  Certainly I seem to lack hope in most of my daily activities - but I question if that is less of an abandonment of hope than a simple acknowledgement that it simply cannot exist in these circumstances, not that it cannot exist.

All I do know is at this moment things seem to be a long barren road fading into the distance, seemingly leading back to where I am standing.