I’m writing every morning but have run out of content, so the only way to produce is to regurgitate the old. But even that has slipped my mind. So now I’m left with nothing but mashed potatoes in my brain. I feel like I’m dead if death is how this feels. Maybe I should write once a week, so then I’ll have something to write about instead of once a day.

There are certain thoughts I can’t mention. Only my journal and therapist know. But I bet it would be interesting. Readers would gobble up that type of shit, but it can’t be written, which is unfortunate. How many secrets do people keep? I wish there were none at all.

I have a dark mind. There’s nothing about it that’s light. A kid in high school used to call me pessimistic. Not that word exactly, just negative. And he was right. I didn’t like that kid, never did. His name was Ben too. I don’t know what happened to him. I can do a quick Google search if I want, but I won’t. I remember he had the same girlfriend from freshman to senior year. How did he do that? He played soccer and had red hair. He used to be nice in junior high before he turned into a prick and called me names I didn’t appreciate. I forgot what those names were, but they weren’t pleasant. How the hell did I think of him this morning? How random. He rode the school bus with me and would harass me by calling me negative, and I had nothing to say.

I learned my negativity from my father, who was negative all the time and is still. Whenever I visit him, he always has something negative to say about mostly everything, and he brings me and my mother down. My mother would say, “Quit being so negative.” But it wouldn’t stop my father, and I caught his illness. So now I see the dark side of things, and it doesn’t really help. Maybe he was being more of a realist, and my mother has always been too much of an optimist. She was that way always. I guess the dark side has always been more convincing to me.

But anyway, I’ll just stick with today’s agenda. It’s Monday, another long week ahead of sales. I have to sell products no one wants, and I have to sell enough to meet the quota expectations. I hate that word: expectations. It really makes the pressure heavier. They expect me to sell these products and I expect me not to care. The job has robbed me of my imagination through stress, and so I struggle every day.

I don’t know what else to do. I could be a better salesperson, but sales was something I never wanted to get into. I just ended up that way because the company has switched me to so many roles. So this was where I landed. They inundate me with too many cases and other assignments, not to mention the pile of emails I have to answer each day. The pile only gets deeper, and I can never catch up. If I was still drinking, I’m sure the drinking would get worse. But that problem was something I got over. It didn’t solve everything.

Now the problems have changed. I look for other jobs, but all the websites like LinkedIn and Indeed and Glassdoor offer are jobs of the same type because of my resume. So it’s hard to change careers. And now that I’m over forty it’s difficult even more. Businesses post disclaimers that they’re equal opportunity and they accept those who are disabled and over forty. At the same time, in the application, they ask for my ethnicity, how old I am, and if I’m disabled. If they were equal opportunity, then why would they need to know? Wouldn’t it not matter? What am I missing? It’s hard to balance all this stress with what I hope to do. I’ve lost what I really wanted.