Short state of the mental

Over the past few months my self-esteem and self-image have taken a solid beating, for reasons I'm not going to go into in detail. I'm immensely grateful for the generosity which has seen us through but also ashamed and guilty and bitter at myself that it got to that point to begin with.

I feel like it was my responsibility /not/ to end up in the situation and I was confident that I could/would do so; so although I know that a certain part of it was circumstantial I am experiencing it as a deep personal failure.

Like, these were mistakes I should have made and learned from in my 20s when no-one was depending on me, not in my 40s with (at least) two other peoples lives involved. I was handed ... not every, but a great many advantages in my youth and more since; and I have, in my complacency and foolishness, completely failed to make anything of that; in fact lost a significant portion of it.

I am determined to make it back / pay it forward in some form, over the next 40+ years, but I don't yet see exactly how and I am afraid that I never will. Although this has opened my eyes that certain things I thought I knew and did I do in fact not know or do/do well/enough, I am at a loss where to start learning or doing things differently.

And I feel constrained by circumstances with no practical idea how to change those either. [Aside about this reflecting how societal change is hard (e.g. to address climate change) without massive central government or grass-roots leadership; because after a certain point the (infra)structures around us are self-reinforcing.]

~~~

There are small positive signs. Although I may currently be on the brink of a crash (which this long weekend will hopefully alleviate) I have hammered (judicious use of sleeping pills + E relying on my for morning transport) my sleeping pattern back into something which allows me to be functional for most of the day. My fatigue issues are slowly slowly receding; I have been making my targeted hours or better at work for the past few weeks, even though that has usually meant working a half-day or day at the weekend to make up for time missed during the week attending to other matters; i.e. my overall productivity and ability-to-do-stuff is up.