I'm about to feel sorry for myself. Please ignore me, I just have to throw this out into the void. Because I have nowhere else to release it to.
I'm in a new city (well, 7 months isn't that new, but it's new enough) at a new job. My closest friend is my husband, who is having some problems right now and taking them out on me. My job is very exciting, but as a 23 year old with naught but an undergraduate degree I'm responsible for a million dollar, multi-site R01; and a very ambitious one at that. They finally got me an assistant, but she won't be able to help with any of the development, technical or theoretical, that's giving me a heart attack right now. I've been given an impossible task: to replicate a study and add novel techniques and measures to it without purchasing any of the equipment used in the former study. So I've been laboring away; writing software, modifying hardware, attempting to adjust the functionality of neurophysiologic tools we do have that were designed for completely different purposes. And I'm doing it. And I'm doing it well. But I'm not doing it fast enough for them, we have NIH deadlines and recruitment schedules, hospital administration breathing down our neck...all because when they hired me to do this no one considered that we might need the equipment neccesary to perform the experiment.
On top of that, my husband does not seem to think it's important to pay me back any of the money I've loaned him over the years, and in fact lost his job (and me) because of his problems with alcohol. And I'm flat broke. So I work nights as a phone sex operator on a no taboos line, pays OK. I get up every morning at 7:30, go to the hospital, frantically try to pull off nearly impossible feats of coordinating folks at three different sites in three different states, do my best to not have any bad news for them regarding the development I'm breaking my back over, get yelled at anyway because it wasn't done yesterday, and then get snide little snaps from the psych associate who has decided I'm disorganized and lazy even though she has nothing to do with my project and has never seen my work output. Then I try to clean my house, as well as feed myself and my kitten, before I have to log into the chatline at 7 and then have phone sex with strangers who are allowed to discuss bestiality, pedophilia, rape, and drugs until 11. I'm pretty good at everything but the black and the domination lines, although most of the young girl calls end up being domination anyway. I have no outlet for human contact or support, because I have no family and my husband just lashes out at me and tries to hurt me as much as he can whenever I try to talk to him about his problems, let alone mine. Other friends I have shy away immediately if I even come close to opening up to them; they want to have fun with me, drink sake and talk about movies or hear my crazy stories and dance to the cramps all night long, but not hear me talk about myself. My husband said once, when he was really mad at me, or just hurt because I told him I couldn't be with him anymore unless he stopped drinking, that I was a bitch all the time, and that's why no one cared about me. I've been assured by my friends that this is not the case. However, none of them care enough to listen.
