Miserable

Why do I feel miserable?

Feeling miserable is a classless condition. It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, whether you’re on the poverty line or you’re a millionaire, whether you’re famous or unknown. Feeling miserable is something which any of us can feel at any point in our lives.

Perhaps you know what it’s like to feel miserable? Maybe you’ve experienced it on a short term basis following a difficult episode in your life, or maybe you’ve experienced on a long term basis in the form of depression?

If you have experienced it, you’ll probably know how insidious it is and how it can touch many areas of your life causing the symptoms to worsen and the condition to deepen.

Whilst I have never been diagnosed with depression or even looked at what being depressed entails, I have have a good idea what it’s like to feel miserable.

The symptoms can include feeling anguish, disconsolate, dejected, melancholy, distressed, worthless, humiliated, neglected, lonely, trapped, despairing, grief stricken and more besides.

You could probably sum it up as being unhappy to the point of distress – and I would say that is how I’ve felt for the majority of the last 10 years.

It didn’t just hit me, it’s been a progressive thing and it’s come and gone depending on what’s been going on in my life, but for the most part, if I were to label the last ten years of my life it wouldn’t be overstating it to say it’s been miserable.

I need to balance what I’ve just said by pointing out that it hasn’t all been bad and I haven’t always felt miserable all the time. There have been lots of times when I’ve been happy and overjoyed, but often these moments have been fleeting.

I also know that I have a great deal to feel grateful about but this alone hasn’t been enough to stop me feeling the way I have.

Before I go on to tackle the issue of how to find happiness in a later post, please allow me give you a potted history of the last two decades and hopefully you may be able to understand how I came to feel like I did.

The Potted History Of A Miserable Man:

I enjoyed my work to begin with. I trained hard for two years to become qualified and I built the foundations for a good career.

To be fair, I was a young man of 20 when I started out in my profession and didn’t have a care in the world. I fell in with a great crowd during the training and we worked hard and played hard. Looking back they were some of the best times of my life.

In a way I was blinded by my own enthusiasm and just couldn’t see the negatives of my chosen career.

It wasn’t until I was four years in, that my eyes were really opened and I started to feel uneasy about my career choice.

I was still young at 24, and I was still enjoying the excitement of the work and the friendships I’d made, so I pretty much overlooked my feelings of uncertainty. In addition, I was well aware that I’d already made the investment of training for two years and then spent a further 2 years developing my skills.

It was around that time that I met the woman who would later become my wife. My attention drifted away from work and my mind was blissfully occupied with thoughts of love and romance.

By now I was five years into my career and had become more than competent to the point where I was bored with the role. The work wasn’t so rewarding anymore. I mean to say that I took a great deal of satisfaction from doing a good job but I started to realise that so many people around me did half the volume of work and got the same level of recognition and reward.

I started to see that the system was broken and felt the first true feelings of disappointment.

Fortunately my career choice was such that I was able to change roles and departments. That’s exactly what I did. I got some additional qualifications and moved to a training role. In fact it was better than that, I was offered the chance to build a small training department for my branch of the organisation and my enthusiasm for work was reignited.

I set aside the concerns over my previous misgivings about the job, and put them down to having spent too long in the same role. I felt I was probably burnt out and reasoned that new challenges would do me the world of good. Anyway, I’d invested more time in getting qualified so there was no way I was going to walk away.

Besides, I was still in the first flush of love and frankly giddy from the speed at which my circumstances were changing.

I got comfortable in my new training role and concentrated on my love life. I proposed and spent the next two years being a fiancee and preparing to get married.

During that time I’d become too comfortable in my training role and my elevated position with the additional responsibility allowed me to see the true degree of ineptitude in those above me.

I started to see how the system worked from the inside. The daily political wranglings were astonishing and actually helped me to understand where my initial misgivings had stemmed from.

My colleagues and I were being used to further the career of whomever happened to be in charge at the time. I suppose I was naive not to realize that this sort of thing went on, but I couldn’t have been prepared for the extent of the manipulation.

Like many people do, I decided I was going to get promoted and deal with the ‘rot’ from a position of power, so I set about studying and training for the next level. Having spent a year studying and attaining the relevant qualifications, I was knocked back at the interview board, so had to continue jumping through hoops for another year.

This is probably the year that did it for me. I was so fed up with being directed by idiots and I started to show it. I didn’t do myself any favors and eventually I paid the price.

OK, so by now I’m married and getting settled in the marital home. Getting married was a great experience but I confess I already had doubts about my relationship – but my pattern of burying troubling thoughts kicked in again and I put my relationship concerns down to the “stress of work”.

With a wife, a mortgage and several years of training and work related sacrifice behind me I pushed on. I still felt idealistic about getting promoted and wanting to tackle the issues in management that troubled me so badly.

Basically, I felt I’d come too far to turn back and I made damn sure I was successful in earning my promotion. It was especially important that I got the promotion because my wife was expecting our first child.

The ‘price’ I mentioned earlier was being promoted to a post that everyone avoided like the plague. It was the least popular position in the organisation owing to the very nature of the work, but also because the hours were atrocious.

It was a punishment posting and this is probably where I changed from feeling generally unhappy and frustrated to feeling miserable more often than not.

True to form, I sucked it up and got on with doing the best job I could. I hated it. It was stressful work. It was physically and mentally demanding and there was a real element of danger and peril. I spent two long years in this role and even though I became extremely competent I didn’t enjoy the work and couldn’t get out fast enough.

Early on in my new role our first boy was born and I juggled the stresses of my job with finding my feet as a brand new father. I saw my son being born and that was a joyous moment for sure, but underlying that I knew that I was in trouble on a personal level.

Although I didn’t realize it at this point, my relationship with my wife had also changed. She now had a baby to care for and I was tied up in trying to survive and then thrive at work.

Lots of things were happening and all of them seemed to cause me to bury my discontent.

Shortly after the birth of our first baby, my mother in law moved in with us. Her own circumstances had changed and we were her nearest family. It was far from ideal but we felt duty bound to accept her into our home, it felt like the right thing to do. (And even with hindsight and knowing all the problems it caused it was the right thing to do.)

My wife’s mother was going to be staying for the foreseeable future so we decided to extend our home to accommodate her. In essence we built another small house onto the side of our own. It was hellish. The building work took months, it was dirty and noisy and costly.

After a while my wife went back to work and we shared the responsibility for being at home with the baby. We both worked and swapped over responsibility for child care as our shift patterns dictated.

Only 9 months after our first born arrived my wife fell pregnant with our second child.

His birth was another wonderful moment in my life, but my life now had changed beyond all recognition.

Just after the birth of our second boy I managed to secure a new job in another department and said goodbye to my punishment posting.

I left that role with a great reputation and a good deal of self respect – unfortunately that’s where it all started to go badly wrong at work.

Just as I was about to move to the new role, a role I was promised because of how well I’d done over the previous two years, the job was given to someone else and I was farmed off to the wilderness.

By this time I had lost interest in my career, and whereas before I’d tried hard to do a good job even though I didn’t like what I was doing, this time I really didn’t try hard at all.

My performance at work started to deteriorate and I stopped trying to learn or train myself.

I was deeply unhappy at work and I barely bothered to hide it.

The people who worked for me were well looked after despite the way I felt, but I didn’t care at all for the people above me.

On the home front the arrival of our second was followed by a period where my wife seemed to struggle. It was never diagnosed but it had all the symptoms of postpartum depression, it wasn’t easy for any of us and it played heavily on my mind.

Raising children and working at the same time meant we didn’t see much of each other and we stopped talking about the important things. We just carried on because that’s what people with young families do!

Yet again, I didn’t see it at the time, but my own relationship with my wife was a relationship in name only, we’d become individuals again, even though we lived under the same roof and shared the same bed.

As before, my wife went back to work and we shared responsibility for looking after our two very young children. It was like having two full time jobs, only one of them didn’t pay and the other one I detested.

After a year in the wilderness, with a yet another boss interested only in furthering his own agenda I was invited back in from the cold and I seized the opportunity with both hands.

I was going to be working in a much bigger and busier department with a colleague whom I knew and respected. He was older and much more experienced. I would have a chance to learn what I should already have known but under the wing of a trusted friend.

However, at the last minute the details of the move were changed and instead of working with the experienced guy, I was installed in the lead role and given an inexperienced colleague to work with.

Fortunately I took heart that the boss I was going to be working for was a great guy. He didn’t hold with the way the organisation bred promotion hungry graduates and he embraced the same values and attitudes as me. I liked him and better still I respected him.

As it turns out the the inexperienced colleague was also a great guy and extremely competent. I felt like I’d fallen on my feet. What a relief.

I did just fine, and started to rebuild my confidence and my reputation. Home life settled down and we were doing alright – me, my wife the two boys and my mother-in-law.

We rumbled on again for a while and managed to encounter a period of relative happiness and stability and during this period our third child was conceived. Things were on the up, but it wasn’t to last long.

I got a phone call from my mother telling me that my dad had been diagnosed with cancer.

It was early days though and the outcome was by no means a certainty. There was every chance he could get better.

Right about that time my boss was moved and in his place was put a very young and inexperienced female graduate. The type who get to miss all of the basic grounding because they’re flagged for higher things.

The fact that she was female and a graduate didn’t worry me, nor the fact she was flagged for higher things, but the fact that she was incompetent and self-serving did.

Shortly after her arrival my inexperienced yet very capable colleague was moved and replaced by another inexperienced and totally incapable guy so frightened of his own shadow that he needed to double check everything with anybody and everybody who’d listen.

The team I was working with rebelled against the pair of them and I was stuck in the middle with a failing team, trying to cajole them along, whilst having to carry the extra load created by my inept colleague, at the same time as fighting the direction the boss wanted to go.

At home I had my pregnant wife who still working, our two young boys and my mother in law who I was having difficulty adjusting to.

On a daily basis I was constantly plagued by troubling thoughts about work and home life and I barely went more than an hour without thinking of my father’s ill health.

I started to neglect my fitness, I started to neglect my responsibility for maintaining the finances and I had to contend with my dad being 300 miles away with the cancer taking a deeper hold over his life.

My ability to cope with my workload and the other unwelcome burdens diminished and something got missed at work. After an investigation, a subordinate was disciplined for the mistake and I stood by him, seeing it as a problem created by the poor management team of which I was a part.

Surprisingly my colleague and my boss failed to stand by me and I was duly disciplined for the error as well. In hindsight I shouldn’t have been surprised at all as I knew they didn’t operate to the same moral code that I did and I resented it.

My colleague was replaced by yet another inexperienced guy. He was a good man, but the damage to the team was already done.

My father died at 59 years old and never got to see our third child. I went to see him before he passed away and said my goodbyes. I also went to his funeral but that didn’t offer any closure. I just couldn’t let go of his death, nor could I deal with it, so I just bottled it all up. I was deeply saddened but refused to show it and carried on as though it had never happened.

My wife believes this is the time when it all went wrong for us as a couple and on a personal level but it started long before then, and maybe I’d done a better job of hiding it than I thought?

By now, such was the pressure I was under that I made another significant mistake at work. I made an uncharacteristic error of judgement, and that allowed for what happened next.

The situation at work got worse until the senior managers decided to split the team up. Funnily enough my boss wasn’t moved, but myself and my colleague were.

After years of being more than capable and competent I was reduced to this, and I couldn’t believe how far I had sunk. I felt humiliated.

The cruel irony of this latest twist was that I was moved to work under the man who had first motivated me to get promoted several years earlier. They say that when you’re struggling for motivation to pass the professional qualifications, you should picture the most useless buffoon already at the level you want to be, and know that if they can do it, so can you.

He was that guy.

I worked for him for over a year and I never changed my opinion of him.

Our third child also being our first daughter was born, and like the other two births it was a moment of great joy to see her arrive in this world.

Home life was truly hectic with another baby and work had become tolerable. Barely, but tolerable nonetheless. I guess I had other things to worry about.

My wife returned to work and we continued to share the child care between us.

I got my chance to get away from the buffoon when I was headhunted to fill another role and I jumped at the chance. The hours were better and more flexible, easing the difficulties of sharing the childcare while we both worked.

The new role I’d moved to wasn’t exactly something I wanted to do, but the convenience it offered was something I couldn’t overlook. I still disliked work but as before I found a way to tolerate it.

Life settled down once more and that’s when my wife became pregnant with our fourth child.

Work was fine for a while and we managed.

We welcomed another little girl into the world and our family was complete – besides which, we didn’t have room in the house for any more children!

It was tough for my wife with the four little ones and it was tough to for me too because I really didn’t know how to help her. I wanted to, and even though we’d grown apart I still loved her and so it hurt to see her struggle.

I would go out to work in the morning and see her struggling to cope with the newborn while having to get the two boys ready for playgroup and school. Our eldest daughter was still a only 15 months old at this point so it was difficult for her managing alone all day.

But that was the way life was. We just carried on. We had to, there was no other way.

I was getting along OK at work, but it wasn’t great. I knew that I’d stuck with my profession much longer than I should have, but we now had four children, a big mortgage and some additional debt. I was well and truly stuck.

With the premature death of my father I understood only too well that life on this earth is limited and that nothing is guaranteed.

Whilst I was grateful for what I had, I wasn’t content and I wasn’t happy.

True to form the work troubles started again when my manager fell foul of the internal politics and was moved. Unfortunately for me his replacement was another self serving hypocrite and I ran into some problems communicating with him. I didn’t need this. I really didn’t.

For my wife the strain of coping with family life was taking it’s toll. The stress of just trying to get all the children ready in the morning made for a tense atmosphere. I felt guilty for going to work and that was made worse for the fact that I didn’t even enjoy the work anymore.

Most mornings I felt so guilty that I stayed home to make sure they all got out of the door. Of course that made me late for work, so I had to stay later to catch up and then stay a little beyond that to show that I was pulling my weight.

Coming home late wasn’t popular either and I felt like I just couldn’t win. I tried to keep my wife’s attitude towards me in perspective but I began to focus on our failing relationship and questioned whether there was still any love in our marriage.

As you might imagine based on what I’ve already told you, I didn’t do this openly. I felt I was under attack on every front and became more insular and withdrawn – I bottled it up. It was the only way I felt I could cope.

The work issue came to a head. My values just didn’t fit with those of my bosses or the organization as a whole. I felt we weren’t doing the job were were supposed to do and we weren’t providing the service our customers expected. Instead it had become all about meeting targets for the sake of meeting targets. It was all wrong, I knew it and what’s more I was openly defiant about it.

Not surprisingly, it wasn’t long before I was sent back to a wilderness, with atrocious hours to boot. It was the last thing I needed for myself or my family. But we had to carry on regardless.

My wife went back to work, just as she’d done after each of the first three children were born.

This time the hours I was expected to keep were not flexible in the least and my employer was unwilling to negotiate. I ended up doing night-shifts, finishing at 7am and having to stay awake to look after the children all day.

The pressure I was feeling was enormous. My life was falling apart, my career had disintegrated before my eyes and I was exhausted.

Both my wife and I had been much more susceptible to cough, colds and sore throats since our first child arrived and sleepless nights were the norm with a near certainty that at least one of our children would be awake half the night.

It was all just too much for me to cope with and I went to see the doctor who promptly signed me off work for two months with “exhaustion”.

Then something good happened.

My wife and I talked it through and decided that she would remain at work and increase her hours and start to rebuild her own career again. I would remain at home and take care of everything concerning the running of the household and raising of the children.

The idea being that when they were all in full time education I could go back to work.

So that’s what we did.

I felt such a massive sense of relief but financially I knew we would struggle so I started to think about ways to negate my lost salary.

I started learning about how people earn money online. I researched blogging and found that I liked the idea of it. I reasoned that I could do it in between my duties at home. It gave me hope that I could work when it suited me and my family.

I believed I could write well enough to draw an audience and earn money through advertising and felt it was worth a try.

When I started out, I didn’t know how much I didn’t know (if that makes any sense?). It turns out I knew next to nothing and had a lot of learning to do. I didn’t mind that though. It was a new challenge and I was doing something that interested me, something creative, something I felt good about.

I immersed myself in this stuff.

I taught myself how to buy domain names, set up sites, set up hosting and email and I even learnt how to customize themes. It was a massive learning curve and took up a lot of time.

Through a mixture of luck and judgement, I found myself doing really quite well after only a couple of months. I’d attracted an audience and seemed to be on course to making it work.

Sadly, I encountered some problems. Firstly, I was spending so much time learning and putting it into practice that the home-life started to suffer. And secondly, I ran into so many technical problems that I just couldn’t keep it all going.

It was difficult to justify the time I was putting into the blogging when my duties at home were being neglected, and to make it worse my wife doesn’t believe in earning a living like this. To her mind there’s only one way to do it and that’s through having a job and working for someone else. Understandably, having a guaranteed and steady income every month helps her feel secure.

Unfortunately my life experiences were telling me that being trapped in a job you hate for a lifetime is a waste of a lifetime. I also knew I was capable of so much more. I wanted to prove it to myself, to my wife, and to everyone else that had seen my steady decline.

I felt compelled to follow my instincts and stay online.

So most days I was trying to get all the online stuff done while my wife wasn’t around, or in the evening while she watched TV.

I was so desperate to find self-worth through proving I could earn a money online that I shut my life down. I reasoned that once the money started coming in, the sacrifice would be worth it and all would be forgiven.

As I said, things started not getting done. The house didn’t get tidied, the home finances were left in a poor state, I was fractious with the kids, and off hand with my wife and mother in law.

Until recently I blamed my failure to build a money making online business on several factors, key amongst which was my wife’s failure to support me. Having no interest in what I was doing or how I was doing, or even why I was doing it led me to feeling isolated.

If ever I sat down to do some work while my wife was present, I’d get the silent treatment or perhaps the one word answer scenario. At the very least she’d become withdrawn and that would play on my mind.

The point is, that with all of this stuff pressing on my mind I was rarely in the mood to do the work needed to make a success of my endeavour. I couldn’t summon the state of mind I needed to be in, to be creative and productive. I spent most of my time being confused, angry, or resentful.

Eventually my wife had had enough, feeling that she’d indulged me for long enough she demanded change.

We came to what we believed to be a resolution, but it wasn’t really. I still had a lot of things I didn’t say to her. Things I wanted to clear the air over. Unresolved issues about things that had happened over the years and I couldn’t get past the resentful feelings I harbored.

For a while things went fine but the old habits of being closed off and insular crept back in. I reacted badly to the old triggers and deeply resented my wife’s lack of support or understanding.

I was absolutely desperate to restore my self esteem by making a success online that spent even more time trying to achieve my goals. I was determined to prove that I wasn’t the loser and miserable failure I perceived I’d become.

My desperation showed through in my mood and behavior and my family suffered again as I became defensive and withdrawn. My mind went back to churning over the conflicting feelings and I found it hard to concentrate on being either creative or productive. Time I was spending with my family was wasted because I was thinking about my problems online and my time online was wasted because I was thinking about my family.

The issues with our relationship came to a head again recently and it was horrible to have to face up to.

There was the real prospect that our marriage was over, but I somehow found the courage to accept that my problems with my career and my relationship were largely the product of the decisions I’d made. I realised that I was responsible for the state my life was in and I accepted the blame for damaging my relationship with my wife.

My wife accepted that she had played a part in the problems but we both knew that my attitudes and actions were the real cause.

Sure there were other factors and circumstances that came into play that caused me to feel overwhelmed at home and at work, which in turn exasperated the problems and made it harder for me to dig my way out of the hole.

At no point did I act despicably or maliciously and everything I did, I did for what I thought were the right reasons. My motivation was genuine and I always believed I had my family’s best interest at heart but my desperation to avoid returning to the kind of work I hated, blinded me.

In my darkest moments over the last ten years I’ve sometimes felt so miserable that I’ve had thoughts of leaving my wife and children and I’ve also had thoughts of ending my life. I’m glad to say that I never seriously considered suicide but nonetheless I was troubled that I was moved to even think about it.

I take a great deal from the fact that I haven’t walked away from my responsibilities and deep down I know why that is. I love my wife and children. It’s as simple as that.

Blaming my problems on other people and circumstances out of my control helped me to rationalize the problems at the time, but now I see that it only deferred having to deal with them, but of course it’s easy to say that now with hindsight.

Having cleared the air with my wife and having started to rebuild our relationship, the nagging feelings about our relationship that paralysed me over the years have subsided. They’re not gone yet, as occasionally they bubble to the surface as old triggers are set off. But being able to operate on a daily basis without my unconscious mind churning over the conflicts in my life, I can start to rebuild my life and start the pursuit of happiness.

My finances are my major concern now. I’ve really let them drift and as a result I’ve accumulated some significant debt. It’s embarrassing to admit that I’ve been so careless but it’s important to do so if I’m to change the situation.

I’m proud to say I’ve taken the first steps in remedying my situation myself. I suspect I’ve been influenced by all that I’ve read over the years in books and online but the real benefit will come as I put How To Be Rich and Happy to use.

I don’t want to live a miserable life any more and I’m changing but I have to continue to tread carefully and make sure I get the balance absolutely right but at least now I’m open to the idea that I can be happy and moreover I know how to be happy NOW!

If you’ve stuck with me this far, thank you.

This post is a long one and I make no apologies for that because this site is all about demonstrating that I’m making progress in my life and showing that what I’m learning in How To Be Rich And Happy is working for me. In order to do that, I need to provide an outline of where I’ve come from, some of the problems I’ve faced and a little insight into the way I feel about my life. My intention is that it serves as a bench mark from which to judge my progress.

This post will probably be updated a little as I remember some of the key events. I’ve spent a few days trying to capture the essence of my life over the last twenty years and honestly, some of the elements of the timeline may be slightly off. I’ll make adjustments as I go, but essentially this is a good reflection of the last two decades.

Now that I’ve told you where I’ve been, next I’ll tell you where I want to go, and then how I’m going to get there. After that it’ll be all about the journey.

Please feel free to stick around to see how I get on.

Andy.

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Thank you, Andy

Tagged as: anguish, depression, lonely, miserable, personal development, unhappy at work, unhappy marriage