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What would you rate my life on scale of 1-10?

I'm 32; my boss is half a decade younger than me. Today, he scrutinized my car cleaning work while I stood in the rain, thoroughly examining the Nissan I'd just finished. I clean cars 60 hours per week because after earning a terminal degree, it's the best I could do after six months of job-searching. I'm going into repayment in a few days on massive student loan debt and just learned that my $10 per hour job means I can't qualify for deferment; I earn too much. Not long ago, I learned that my alma mater's English department, staffed by people I care for a great deal, people whose love and respect I chased with every fiber of my being, hired a young woman to teach creative writing; she filled a vacancy I didn't even know existed despite being in frequent contact with faculty. The young woman was a classmate of mine--one who does not have my bona fides, publishing credits, or credentials. I've never had a girlfriend or been in love. I went on my first date at 29 after losing 117 pounds I have mostly gained back. The two years of my life I was not morbidly obese, I went on more than 70 first-dates, most of them one-offs. Very few of those dates inspired anything that would be called longing--I'd say five or six inspired as much as daydreams or fantasies, and I was ultimately rejected by those few women I had any feeling for, sometimes because of sexual ineptitude or aesthetics. I've spent my last three birthdays alone, not by choice--indeed, last time, I all but begged a beautiful female acquaintance to take me out and get me drunk, which she agreed to do weeks in advance...before she canceled the morning of my birthday. I've never really had a friend. I don't really have a relationship with any of my siblings anymore (two of them are many states away). My parents are rapidly aging. The prospect of being entirely alone looms. I haven't even tried to go on a date in half a year, but I endure rejection daily in the form of notes from employers and publishers. I'm typing this as I lay a few paces from my father's bed; my folks and I share a tiny dwelling. Outside of my time in College when I was fulfilled if not happy, I've thought about suicide on nearly a daily basis. I still think about it a lot, but for the first time in my life I know for sure, with no doubt, that it’s beyond me, and that entertaining the idea I’ll take my life is just my way of indulging in the fantasy of control. It is an exercise in false agency and self-pity I can no longer countenance or take comfort from, and that brings a peculiar sadness. It’s as if I’ve forgotten how to mourn my stillborn youth. In light of my abilities, my circumstance is so clearly monolithic, immovable, plane as day. I’m stuck here, watching people do and be all the things I wish I could with all the people I wish I could do and be. I will struggle mightily through the cobwebs of obscurity and loneliness, wade through tepid boredom, suffer drubbing tedium, excruciating routine, and the stunningly ironic sting of expected disappointment—endure all the burdens of contemporary American life while knowing none of its promised spoils. My soul will starve and wither as I sporadically, ever less-frequently, thrash like a dying fish. That impotent violence will flicker inside what appears to be a semi-comatose half-man ambling upon an inclined treadmill with weary unmet longing in the half-shut slits where his eyes used to be. Slowly the pulses that shoot through me will flatten and dull, modulate. We might call those pulses hope. What do you think of my life? What would you do if you were me? Do you feel bad for me given all the things I'll never know? Cannot a case be made that my life is all the more terrible because it allows for false hope? I am not strong enough for problems beyond what I endure and I would have the ability to kill myself if I had "real" problems, e.g. health problems, homelessness.

Public Comments

1. Thumbs up if you didn't read all that. I'd give ur summarizing skills a 1.
2. I gosh,email Oprah I'm to lazy to read
3. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and go write a book or something
4. Great list of all the current problems and possible scenarios of what could go wrong and how bad it will feel. Now, your next assignment is to write a gratitude list. Write at least 10 things you are grateful for and keep that list with you. Read it 3 times a day and whenever you feel yourself sinking into your current despair. Things will change. If you focus on the good in your life it will feel better than focus on the bad.
5. omfg.. i couldnt be bothered to read this.. its way too long. but imma gonna give u a 2.5 for the effort.
6. your life is about a 5 i seen worse and been in worse that most of that and i still am not doing to bad for myself. everything happens for the better.