Well, so I've been sick for much of the winter. A cold around Thanksgiving, another cold middle of December, then week before last here I caught the flu. We had the snowstorm ("Snowpocalypse 2: Ice Road Boogaloo") and I was home for 2 days before my guilt and fear for my job got me out of the house. Work that day was all right, but then when I got home the ice on the pavement of the driveway made me fall 3 times. I dinged at least 1 rib, and was afraid I'd broken it. This happened right before I got the flu, so while I was coughing my head off with the flu my ribs were killing me. But I went to a walk-in clinic and got some Tamiflu, and I was off work for 5 days. But a couple days after I went back to work I felt healthy again.

Well, except for the downward spiraling. But I went back to listening to the brainwave entrainment as I fall asleep every night and it acts like an anti-depressant for me. It's weird. It's like I'm on Paxil again but without having to take any pills or risk the whirly-head and barfing when I go off it.

I'd been feeling pretty down. Being sick so much, then not being able to get away from the facts that I'm at a dead end. My job is a dead end, my life is a dead end. I was going to file a grievance but when my union rep at work would go off on a tangent whenever I asked if she'd filed it yet. Then after talking to our new postmaster (new new postmaster, 3rd one at Stockbridge since I've been there), I realized why: Because she can't file a grievance, there's nothing to file about. Yes, I really have been put into a dead end job. I can't get out. I can't advance because there's nowhere to advance to. I've hit the wall. My life, essentially, is over. I'm just waiting to die. So I quit asking about the grievance, and quit talking pretty much at work. There's no reason to. Just take out the garbage, clean the toilets, and wait out my meaningless, pointless life.

Think how it's going to look on my resume -- 16 years and counting at the same employer, and I've never advanced but have in fact been demoted. I was fired and then re-hired after six months. If I was an employer, I'd conclude that I was a troublemaker and / or had absolutely no ambition at all. Another employer isn't going to care nor even care to know that there was nowhere to go in all my jobs with the USPS -- they'll simply ask me why I didn't job-hop within the organization until I got into something where I could advance. So I'll never be able to get a job outside the USPS now. If the lack of education didn't damn me, this would.

And anyway, I'm a janitor. No one's going to hire a janitor for anything but being a janitor.

Part of me wishes I could sue the USPS Human resources department for putting me here and claiming there were no other jobs in the Atlanta district. For one thing they didn't give me even a quarter of the money I should have gotten for back-pay from when I was out of work. For another, they've put me in a situation that is hurting my career advancement. But no lawyer or union rep is going to take that case. I can't even blame anyone, or get back anything for this whole clusterfark.

The whole thing is crushing me. It's like a physical weight pressing down on me. I can't think of anything else sometimes. The brainwave entrainment is helping, but it doesn't do anything to solve the problem. I'm out of ideas and options.

I don't know what to do.