Bleak Reflections

My wife feels depressed. She didn't get the job she was counting on, and she wonders if anyone will ever hire her in that field. She spent six months training intensively for it, passed her certification test, and no one will hire her. Why didn't the instructor tell her from the outset that she would almost certainly not find work in that field unless and until she improved her English? Why didn't we figure this out ourselves and go in a different direction? And if she can't find work in that field, what field can she work in where she can earn half-way decent pay with half-way decent benefits? She was raised by parents who always worked hard and expect their children to do the same, and good Thai children do what their parents expect of them.

As for me, my self-confidence diminishes by the day. I grow more convinced with each day that I am profoundly defective in an overwhelming number of ways cognitively and that my career prospects are bleak at best, and I don't know what to do about it. Get up off my ass and do something? Do what? Do it how?

I wish I had never married my wife. I love her, but she deserves better than she'll ever have with me. I've done some bad things in my life, but marrying her was the worst thing I've ever done because it has tied a precious human life with so much beauty, intelligence, and promise to someone abysmally lacking in almost every way.

People who read this blog have commented before that I'm not seeing myself realistically. But they judge only by what I write or by what they know of me from superficial interaction in person. They don't begin to know me as well as I know myself. They don't see the things I struggle to understand and do every day that normal people understand and do without effort. Writing is just about the ONLY thing I can do with any proficiency at all. But I don't begin to do it well enough to make up for all of the other things I can't do or can hardly do at all.

I won't always feel as gloomy as I do now. At least not in the forefront of my consciousness the way I do now. But these thoughts and feelings are always beneath the surface to fill my mind and heart whenever I'm able or compelled to take a look at reality as it is rather than how I would like it to be.

I feel lost,and so does my wife because she's stuck in a foreign country married to a loser. That is my naked reflection for today.