"Pre-Life Burnout" you say???

Today might be the day I will look back on and realize it is the day I decided to save my own life.

As I've thought back over the past year and it's many frustrations, challenges, and disappointments, I am developing an increasing awareness that a great many of these things have happened because I have allowed them -- inadvertently perhaps, indirectly sure -- but permissive stance has led to this spiraling black hole of internal oppression. And the buck stops here.

I have chosen "pre-life burnout" as the phrase to describe what I believe to be the transition between my "for others" phase of life to my "for myself" phase of life. And I would hate to give the impression that I am implying that I have been a give-all person with no bouts of selfishness or callousness towards the needs of others. No -- rather, most of my life has been fueled by a desire to "fix" the things around me and feeling that all my efforts are not enough. For all the things I have tried to fix, there is an equal portion of self-death that has occured. Trying to fix my mother's life led to the death of my own, trying to fix friendships led to my inability to have them, trying to fix my financial situation led to continued accrual of debt, and so on.

And where does the "pre-life" bit come in? Because I really haven't even begun to live my life! I just finished up my degree at The Evergreen State College and landed a full-time "careery" type of job and am now at the beginning of my adult living. And I'm already burnt out, fried to a crisp, roadkill on a July afternoon in Death Valley. I'm done.

A therapist once referred to this as "over-achiever syndrome" in that I spent so much of my adolescence fucking up all over the map that I've become obsessed in my young adult life with trying to rectify and in essence, make up, for all the bad things I've done. With little success. And it's only getting worse the more and more I seem to achieve, the more I feel I haven't done enough.

So I have a plan.