Do you ever just feel like a failure? Or like a fraud? I am 32 years old, and I have no idea what I want to be when I grow up. I have spent my entire adult life working in the medical field and I am just burned out. It is not making me feel fulfilled and satisfied anymore. I started out working in the healthcare field when I was 17 because I had a desire and a passion to help people. And I still do. But I feel like where I am currently and what I am presently doing is not enough for me anymore. I truly feel like I have a greater purpose in this world, but I can’t seem to figure out what it is. I have SO many ideas running through my mind about what I want to do and accomplish, but I can’t seem to make sense of any of them and I can’t piece them all together. It probably doesn’t help that I suffer from bi-polar disorder and my thoughts are always chaotic anyways. It is getting harder and harder to cope with the fact that I have this burning desire to really do something and be something, but I have no idea what it is. And my disability (which I hate using that word) won’t let me figure it out.

        Life has been one giant struggle for me lately, in more ways than one. I am very grateful for the things that we have, and I never want to take any of it for granted. But it is also very frustrating and disheartening constantly struggling to make ends meet. My husband works a lot, and makes good money, but in our current shit-economy, it still isn’t enough. And that’s basically how my entire life feels-NOT ENOUGH. I feel like I am not enough, like I don’t do enough, like I can’t be enough. I don’t contribute much financially. Hell, my reckless spending habits and lack of budgeting probably kill us more than anything. I SUCK at cleaning. My house is always a mess, and it takes a lot of motivation for me to want to do anything about it. I also hate cooking. I would much rather order food (again, I have terrible spending habits). More so than the cooking part, I hate hate hate having to clean up and do dishes afterwards. If everything could just be disposable, I probably wouldn’t mind cooking as much. So in summary, I am a terrible housewife. My husband is always shitty with me about it, and I really don’t blame him. He works long hours out in all of the elements and has to come home to a dirty house and no cooked meals. And I just can’t seem to find the willpower to change. It’s not that I don’t want to, I truly just don’t know how and that eats away at me a little more every single day. The fact that he has stayed with me for 9 years is nothing short of a miracle.

        To make things worse, I have 3 kids. I feel like I don’t set a good example for them at all. My girls aren’t learning how to cook or clean or be a lady. My son isn’t learning anything valuable from me either. I cuss. A lot. I don’t go to church. I’m not good with money. I’m not teaching them the value of a dollar or how to save or plan or any of those things that a mom should be teaching their children. I am failing them in so many ways and that is what I am struggling with the most. I want them to have a mom they can be proud of. I don’t want them to have a childhood that they have to recover from, like I did. I want them to have learned valuable life lessons from me, and they’re not. More than anything in the world, I want to be better, and do better, for them. And again, I just don’t know how. I truly believe most days that they would be better off being raised by someone else. And that’s a really hard feeling to live with.

        I am not shy about my mental health journey. At least not anymore. It took a long time for me to get to this point. And I won’t go into too many details now. Other than I have attempted suicide in the past and have been hospitalized on 2 other occasions for suicidal ideations. It’s something that I feel like I will constantly battle, no matter how well my medications are working. In addition to the bi-polar disorder (which comes with the obvious depression and anxiety), I have also always struggled with my physical health as well. I’ve always felt like a hypochondriac (and let’s face it, I probably am) because I always have the most random, crazy things wrong with me, but never an answer for them. I have had 9 surgeries and countless injuries. Recently, it has become harder and harder to deal with a lot of the physical symptoms I have always experienced and episodes have become more and more frequent. I was recently diagnosed with fibromyalgia, and I honestly think it’s just given me even more anxiety.

        My mental and physical health has always taken a toll on my ability to work. I have always tried my best to work, no matter how I was feeling, but there have been so many days where I can’t give 100%, and that obviously lands me in trouble. I have been struggling to get out of bed in the mornings, for no real rhyme or reason. I just can’t make myself do it. I have been late to work over 40 times in the past year. And I have had at least 8 (probably more) call-ins. I am not proud of this. But that’s just the truth. I feel lazy and worthless. I am now on a 6-month probation at my job. If I am even one minute late to work, call in, or slip up at all in the next 6 months, I will be terminated. It’s inevitable that it’s going to happen. So now I am struggling with a decision of: do I just keep working and pray that I manage to survive this probation period without getting fired or do I go ahead and cut my losses and find another job now and leave on my own terms before I get fired, because a termination on my record will make it so much harder to find anything else? I have been at my current job for almost 3 years now. I have a wonderful boss and work with the best people. However, I have felt very disconnected from most of my co-workers the last several months. I don’t feel like I fit in there anymore and I feel like an outcast. This has made me consider finding other employment anyways. And like I mentioned in the beginning, I just have this itch to do something different. I love to create things and have been finding myself doing a lot of that lately, but I don’t believe in myself enough to do anything with it and I don’t feel like anything that I create is good enough to make a career out of it. What I really want to do is be in a position to help people. People like me, who struggle, and just need someone to help them. I want to feel like I am making a difference in the world, particularly when it comes to mental health. How I go about doing that though, when I have zero confidence in myself and very low motivation to try and make anything work is the big mystery. I mean, you can do anything you put your mind to, right? Just quit being lazy, and make it happen. That’s what we’re told anyway.

        I also just really want to be in a place with freedom and flexibility. My children are all very active in sports and I feel like I spread myself thin and run myself ragged trying to be there for all three of them all the time. I have too much on my plate, but I will never tell my kids that they can’t do something just because I’m tired or I don’t know how it will fit in my schedule. I would ideally love to have a job where I can work from home and be able to get things done around the house and be available anytime my kids needed me. I feel like this would take so much pressure and stress off me. But isn’t that the dream for any mom? So, I just keep hoping.