Dear alice:

A brief history taken from your three threads (it is probably not perfectly accurate):

Your educational background is in design and you love being creative, but career opportunities in design that allow creativity are limited and the competition is fierce. At one point ,around 2016, you were working for a corporate company and didn’t like the job. You were also “in a desperate dark, dark relationship”. You then quit that job,ended that relationship and left the place you shared with the man, and because you needed to move elsewhere, you spontaneously bought your first home in a quiet village. Making all these changes brought you a “a huge sense of freedom”.

You later started working “part time in a flexible but unchallenging, quite lonely role in a windowless room”, “a glorified factory conveyor belt” job, a job that made you “utterly miserable”, “living hell.. s incredibly repetitive”,  “and every day I am just trying to survive it without breaking down”.

April 2018, at 32,  you shared that you were feeling “really dissatisfied. With life”, that you experience “this nagging feeling of ‘is this it’ is pretty relentless”. “I have always felt this way, dreaming of running away/starting over”, but when you do run away (ending miserable jobs and relationships) and start over, you find yourself in the same emotional experience of life- “so boring… so unsettled/ find it difficult to stay long enough to really grow anything.. I find it all so boring; working/ making money/ paying the bills/ living the same routine”.

I will refer to this same-emotional-experience-of-life as SBSU, standing for So Boring, So Unsettled.

Traveling “more than most”, dating,  moving around a lot, settling in a house in a quiet village, neither of these changed this SBSU for long.

About three months after the above SBSU experience (your second thread), you left your job of 3.5 years, rented out your house, left your quite village and moved abroad, to “a mountain town in Eastern Europe”, living off saving and the rental income. You felt “alive again” and stayed abroad from about July 2018 to October 2019.

Back in your country, you are not able to return to your home yet (still rented out for the next couple of months, I figure), and you are “quickly running out of money”. You are “desperately applying for anything that will pay the bills”.

My input today: when we had a distressing, unsettled, depressing childhood, we keep re-experiencing it as adults. Our brains were formed during those formative years of childhood, chemical habits have been established in our brains and we keep feeling the same way (until and if we gain insight and take on the very slow, patient process of changing those chemical habits).

We try to change that established emotional experience by moving around, changing locations, changing jobs, changing the people in our lives, but none o these changes makes a difference in our established emotional experience. All we get from these changes is a temporary break. It is similar to this (an example): if my established emotional experience is feeling sweaty, the air around me too hot and humid, then changing external circumstances (location, job, people) is like taking a cold refreshing shower, feeling better instantly, but how long can you stay in the bathroom with cold water running.. sooner or later you are out and back to hot and humid air, sweaty.

So now, you are back to your country, back to looking for any job that will pay the bills, back to where you were before the recent break in Eastern Europe.

I hope you do find a  job soon, and I hope this job will not be as bad as the previous one, that it will be much better. But your experience of your next job will be a whole lot about your SBSU established emotional experience with which you will be entering the next job location on your first day there.

I mentioned the only way to change a distressing, depressing established experience of childhood starts with some insight. It is clear to me that your childhood experience was very distressing and depressing, it was hard for you to experience it every day, every day seemed so long, like a living hell at times; it didn’t feel like being alive. You wanted out, you wanted out of that deadness, you wanted to feel alive and happy, but there was no way out.

And now, wherever you are for long, you feel the same way and you want out.

If you agree at least partly with my understanding, please let me know, and if you want, we can communicate further.

anita