Once upon a time I had the tenacity to believe that I'd be a writer one day. I come back and forth here but I no longer know how to put my thoughts down on paper. I want to be coherent and headstrong but all that comes out when I'm alone is a gnawing anxiety that I don't have the heart to deal with. So I don't. I quit the job in the factory. I thought that maybe I could do anything if I trained my mind to get used to it. But there is nothing romantic in being a sad little wreck of a girl. Charles Bukowski was wrong. I care too much about everything. I am so god-damned self-centred - every second of every day - and so I worry about who I am, I worry about how I am and I take every little thing to heart. I have the most ridiculous pain in my chest since I was nineteen, my stomach drops during the night and I cannot sleep for fear of being a disappointment. I'm desperate to stop disappointing myself. I found another job before I left. I knew that I interviewed well. I knew that I would get it. I turned down other jobs. I worked my week's notice even though I cried almost every day. I have found something within myself that money cannot buy. I am reliable to a fault. I will get up and show up, even if it means all of these tears behind closed doors. A year and a half ago a psychic lady told me that I shouldn't quit the job that I had at the time - I'm starting to believe her. I wish being an adult was different to what it has turned out to be. I want to be absolved of my guilt and overcome the fears that are so deeply ingrained in my gut so that I can be a different version of myself and live the best version of my life that I can. Sometimes I fantasise about going back to college to do a masters in creative writing - to one hundred percent wear the title of millennial yuppie. A BA in photography and an MA in creative writing. It makes me laugh when I say it aloud - what a waste of space, what a wonderful life. But I don't know how to be honest with people. I'm not smart enough. I'm not carefree enough. I don't have enough money. I don't know where I'm going. Thirty is creeping up, month by month. Only another two and a half years and I'll be a thirty year old child living in her parent's spare bedroom. My current job is the toughest I have committed to yet. The working hours are wonderful - Monday to Friday, nine to five thirty - but it's not such a fantastic trade off for what it is that I have to do. People who are long-term unemployed come to me, sit with me one on one and we work to try to find them long term sustainable employment. But there's a catch. Most of them don't want to be there, and only show because their welfare is at risk of being cut if they don't show up. So people are volatile, or quiet, or a million miles away. And there's no time, there's no jobs, there's no hope. It's always been a dead end town and it shows no signs of changing. I've been in my current office for two weeks now and already two people have left - one quit of her own accord, and one never passed his probation. It was a strange day, Friday, to be asked to leave the office by my manager. I sat in the back of my co-worker's car, eating an ice-cream and listening to eighties power ballads while my boss fired somebody whom I had already learned so much from. And now we're cut shorter again. Where there should be six of us to deal with the case loads, there are now only three. I'm struggling. I feel constantly overwhelmed. My weekends are not my own because they are consumed with a tightness in my chest. I don't know how to help other people. I can hardly help myself. But somehow I persevere. I refuse to keep quitting. I allow myself to fall into the depths of self-doubt, but others tell me that I am strong, that I can do these things, and somehow I know that they believe it. Maybe one day I will, too.