Existential Crisis Time!

 It's been a while, but I figured I'd pop in and share something that's been on my mind for a few days.

I'm tired. More like exhausted, existentially-speaking.

Words cannot express the existential exhaustion coursing through my veins and even sitting down to try to write about it in an attempt to calm my nerves. Try to exorcise these demons that have been plaguing me. While the current existential crisis is recent, ultimately, it's been going on for years, with waves of depression and anxiety.

Here goes nothing.

I'm tired of living in this hellhole of a country.

I'm tired of simply being and serving virtually no purpose in life. 

I was laid off from my job of 4 1/2 years last March, and since then I've been under the assumption that having saved for the 6 years since I moved back in with my parents in 2015 would be enough to keep me afloat and sane and help lead me to bigger and better things. Following my dreams. Living the life I was meant to live.

But instead, I got saddled with the ongoing crippling depression and anxiety that didn't go anywhere (they were hardly recent). I had big dreams. My roommate and I were going to start a travel blog. We were going to monetize it. People were going to be interested in our tips and our info and our stories. I was going to tell our stories, I was going to share our pictures. We were going to sell stock photos on Adobe and Getty.

Reality's a bitch.

Turns out no one cared. As expected.

The blog got very few hits, despite family members and family friends telling me how excited they were to read our stories and live vicariously through our posts.

Four entries online, and a maximum of 50 views in the year it's been up.

Validation of my every fear.

No. One. Cares.

Really, truly, no one cares.

People are all talk, no show, no action.

People wanted to see photos.

I post photos, no one says anything. No "likes". No comments.

And I'm supposed to just be okay with this. For some reason.

I still have money, but now I can't get a job.

I've spent the last few months applying for jobs. Redoing and revamping my Indeed profile, my LinkedIn profile, my résumés/CVs. Applying to jobs in the EU, jobs in the US. Remote jobs. Jobs that supposedly fit my background.

Either crickets, or the "We have proceeded to move forward with other candidates whose background is closer to what we're looking for". Or the classic "The position has already been filled/We are no longer looking for candidates at this time."

Ok.

Fine.

This country is supposedly going through something called the Great Resignation where people are leaving jobs en masse, leaving companies to frantically hire people for twice what they're worth and half of what they're valued for, and I still can't get a job.

But sure.

I'm not the right candidate for your company/position.

Ok.

And the European jobs? Well, wouldn't you know... NO ONE HIRES AMERICAN CITIZENS FOR JOBS IN EUROPE.

I knew this going in, but figured I had nothing to lose.

And the worst part? I'm better qualified for European job listings than for anything I've seen in the US so far.

My language background, my personal background, hell, even my professional background is more valuable in Europe than it is in the US.

And Europeans won't hire me.

Americans won't hire me.

I'm a useless shell of a human being and while normally I'd hear people reassuring me, telling me it's a fluke, to just keep trying...

I've been at this for months. MONTHS. That's not an exaggeration.

It's been literally months since I started trying to look for jobs.

If just so I could start making money again. Not because I'm going broke but because I'm bored, I don't like not having income coming in, and because I need a social life. I miss talking to work people, I miss making work friends.

My attempts at a a social life since I lost my job are pitiful excuses, especially since the communities I've been trying to establish myself in clearly don't want me. I've tried, I've tried to get involved with TCK communities but they don't want my whining and complaining, my bitching and moaning. I can tell, even if they don't tell me.

That and I just don't feel like I belong there anyway.

Whether it's the US citizens who haven't lived in the US since birth because "I just don't feel at home there" and then go on to tell me that there are ways around the visa requirements without actually giving me any of those ways... and me over here knowing they don't exist unless you want to be an English teacher.

Or whether it's the people with multiple citizenships who rag on Americans and are so glad they don't live in the US anymore when they have the luxury of not living here to begin with.

Or the non-US citizens who can live in so many more places than I can and are blissfully ignorant.

I understand that me being bothered by all of this is just me taking things personally, and fine. I am making a choice to be bothered by these things. And the logical side of me that isn't governed by my chemically imbalanced brain knows that honestly, these people probably really do care and consider me a part of their community.

But I still can't help feeling that I just can't express myself to the fullest expression of who I am and how I feel because no one else can relate (and I know this because I have yet to have one person send me a message and say "I know exactly how you feel, I struggle with this as well, let's figure it out together!" I thought I had that once, but then it turned out that person had another passport and I was just like "well there goes that"). All of the people mentioned have been truly friendly with me, so it's not like everyone "hates" me. But that doesn't mean that I feel like I've found "my people" or "my community".

I'm going to reiterate.

I CAN'T STAND IT HERE.

With every single fiber of my being I want to not be here.

And there is literally nothing I can do about it.

Nothing.

Nothing at all. 

I'm not rich enough. I'm not good enough at anything to be able to monetize any skill I might have to be able to make a living at anything. I can't be a "digital nomad" for this reason. I'm not qualified or skilled enough for a qualified worker's visa in Europe. I'm not skilled creatively, I can't do anything that would allow me to monetize anything to be able to get a nomad visa to earn me money from overseas.

I don't need people telling me to "be happy where you are". I wish I could, really. I really wish I could. You could blame the chemical imbalance in my brain due to the decades I've been dealing with depression and anxiety and thus making it even harder to embrace a reality that's less gloomy.

I'm just tired of feeling like I need to always look at the bright side and being happy and faking it till I make it.

I want to mourn, really, truly, mourn the fact that every single fiber of my being just wants to experience living abroad again. I want and desire that feeling of being a fish out of water, of trying to navigate visas and consulates/embassies and paperwork and opening a new bank account in another country and figuring out how to pay rent and make rent and getting used to a new work culture and environment and everything. I want that so badly.

I don't look at it as an issue of "the grass is greener". I grew up living in another country, under my parents. I've never lived there on my own, being responsible for myself. But I did live in other countries, being in other cultures, learning other languages, adapting to different ways of thinking. 

I'm not meant to stay in this country, even if I am in a culturally diverse area that is more closely related culturally to being somewhere abroad than anywhere else in this country.

I legitimately feel and believe that I don't belong here. I'm not happy here. Every fiber of my being wants so badly to be somewhere else. Anywhere else.

And it's exhausting to me that I have no one to talk about this with who understands, who feels, who knows. Everyone else has been able to get out, live somewhere else, or has managed to find happiness where they are.

I feel so alone. 

It's exhausting being this alone.