Nuanced grief is almost worse than overblown sadness.

Dear Diary,

It's saturday night and I feel as if I have been very creative, productive, leisurely and spontaneous. Objectively speaking I have completed the following: job application and a few job searches, those count as two main tasks for today. I didn't do any training, I ate a bit more than usual and even though I've cleared up a pretty large and daunting backlog of reading tasks from GReader (instead of allocating them to a later date), Its not big enough a task to merit marking on the main list of things.

In one way today has been unproductive, in another it has been quite a break from the norm. I've applied to a reasonable number of jobs this week passing, however I do feel that I've set a lot more than I have in recent months. I am in fact overwhelmed with tasks. I didn't observe almost all of my day's schedule today because I felt intimidated by my schedule. I've got about 5-6 jobs to apply to with a deadline of the 22nd, it's a little daunting if I'm honest. However looking at the actual jobs I've applied to and my activities of the week, it looks like my recent time has been more about cutting losses and getting a satisfactory amount completed, rather than getting 'everying' done. In that way I'm reminded of the old anxiety days of my second year of uni.

I feel the fear of getting older. I don't want to be old, I've achieved nothing of importance in my life. I think the realisation of my own inadequacy was at university. I didn't have many friends, and I found myself a bit more of a place in university societies, I had sort-of-friends at the societies, people who had to be there (due to shared interests) but probably weren't really my friends. But they were nice all the same. As committees changed each year, I realised the limitations of the loyalties and friendships. I got really worried when the philosophy society didn't have a potential committee in the coming year, I felt that I had to take up the position in order to maintain the good work of the society, and since there were no 2nd years in the committee or getting involved, I needed to step up.

What actually happened was that the whole society got infected by a committee of first years who never joined the society and then ended up in the committee. This happened time and time again as the next two years taught me, I then felt that I learned a lesson in life. Incumbance means nothing, there's always someone who is going to replace you, they are younger and probably better than you. My intentions, my anxieties meant nothing to them, the only thing that held weight was populism.

I felt disheartened at university, as if I wasn't disheartened enough with all the personal shit I was going through. The societies I was involved with, were an attempt to say: this is my activity and I'm helping out: here's something that no one can take away from me. But alas, they did. I guess I feel quite down about that. This week (it almost passed me by) was 'A' level results day, this usually makes me get all schmaltzy and sentimental about my 2004 moment, I've valorised that day so much that I'm tired of telling the story. Perhaps this year, as well as last year, were the first times in which I've just not been too bothered about thinking of those days.

If there's a lesson to learn it is that aspiration is totally false. All the optimism and hope that I had didn't take me very far, backstabbing, personality management in the style of Goffman, nepotism and blagging are the only ways forward. What kind of society promotes a message like that? A society that makes me feel strangled. I am a failure. I remember how people at the REED job scheme were bemused at how I could still be unemployed, I had more qualifications than most of the people in the room put together, and I'm applying for the same paid jobs as them. They felt sorry for me, they didn't think I deserved it.

I think the utterly sobering realisation is that I do deserve this situation. I live with my parents, I'm a loser who fucks a pillow every night for sexual and emotional comfort. I've only been with one woman, I can barely afford my counselling feeds, I've not got a decent job and (ed.) almost everything I apply to is pointless. I feel hopeless, I don'thave a stake in society, I want to kill myself. I want to purge, I want to make things better, I feel so utterly desperate that I would do something desperate to make it better.

I don't know what's worse, feeling this shitty, or realising that purging does not help anything. Nuanced grief is almost worse than overblown sadness. At least the latter gives me the impression of catharsis.

I'm so fucking pathetic.