Mother’s little helpers. Or, is it even possible to stop comparing youself to others?

The irony is not lost, having just returned from a doctor’s appointment where a dude with a heavy accent and a massive slit scar to his throat patiently listened to the problems of an insomniac overprivileged white women, whose main complaints are job dissatisfaction and the fact she doesn’t like herself all that much at the moment, and handed her a prescription for diazepam to counteract the problems of alleviating the stresses of first world living – mainly overindulging in white wine and strong Arabica coffee.

Problems are problems nonetheless, and it isn’t lightly that I’d take a day off from a brand new job to be hung up on by the doctor’s surgery having waited patiently listening to elevator muzak for forty minutes, but there it is. It’s hardly better than sitting in an office waiting to be called upon for skills that are simultaneously too great and too minimal to serve the role they’re called upon for.

It may be perfectly obvious to me how I got myself into a situation where my job description (my sixth new role in as many years) elicits looks of painful sympathy from friends and family. But what’s not obvious is how I’m going to get myself out. I feel any spark of creativity drying up, and I’m too beholden on not feeling a twinge of anxiety every time I open my wallet – now conveniently stored on my phone for all I’m too much of a nouveau Luddite to go all in with Apple Pay.

Any yet the anxiety with which I greet every new buzz of my phone is all too real – whether it’s WordPress telling me my stats have gone up and I’m worried someone may be stalking me for all the wrong reasons, to my newly installed work app that buzzes with myriad unfathomable and often unnecessary emails, for which I’m paid a significant amount to answer in a time appropriate manner wherever I happen to be or whatever I happen to be doing. It’s enough to drive you to distraction, which is, after all the age we live in.

And then, because I don’t want to be beholden to an employer to fund my living expenses into my seventies like most of my generation’s working population will, there is my portfolio career to worry about – my blog notwithstanding which has been languishing ever since I installed Grammarly and realised sorting out their mistakes was taking up more time than correcting my own.

No, it’s the investments that mean I can leave the rat race at some point in the future, that interrupt it in the present, from the Bitcoin fluctuations that fuel momentary financial confidence before plummeting back down to earth, to the rather more sensible Fintech investment that may take a lifetime to pay out. And then there’s the Air BnB dispute – our previous ‘guests’ flooded the bathroom, marked the walls and broke a pot –  and given her attitude throughout her stay, I wouldn’t doubt this was done on purpose. But either way, she’s refused to pay and it’s now gone back to the questionable judges of the aforementioned rental app, to see if we can get a couple of hundred quid to repair the damage, all the while our ranking is affected that may affect future bookings. Is it worth it? I hope it will be, one day, in order to escape the tyranny of a mortgage and the need to earn a living, but right now, it’s making me cry in front of my children and shout at Tom, so who knows?

It is perhaps this constant need to compare myself to others that drives me onwards – I can live with a half-baked career if I can have a holiday home – one must always be seen to be moving forward, or else we are simply stagnating – which is why the sleep issues that arises from my generalised anxiety about modern life is so annoying – I can’t do anything when I’m tired, whether that’s fixing typos, or being someone I’m proud of, let alone believing anyone else thinks I’m worth staying friends with.

So if I can get that sorted, perhaps I can sort  everything else – be nicer and more proudctive at home, not lose my (paying) job (again) because I’m too tired to concentrate and have the energy to chase up all the other things that, while they may be tiresome in the present , are intended to make me happier in the future. Hence the short term “fix” as my GP described it, the diazepam. Mother’s little helpers. But, in a world that offers little in the way of help for mothers, perhaps they are exactly what I need to keep the balls I need to juggle right now in the air.