My contract is up in a month. I don’t know what I’m going to do. No, literally. I don’t know if I am going to be extended or shown the door.

Is this uncertainty the cause of my (current) malaise? I’m not sure. I mean I’ve clearly been unhappy for some time and I really do want this job to go well but my mood has been getting lower the longer this has gone on.

I caved in and asked my therapist if I could have an appointment. I have to applaud modern technology – I’m in the UK and she’s in Israel now but can still see her thanks to the wonders of Skype. So I sat and I waited for my appointment, patted the cat on the head and made a few notes. Here they are:

Maybe I’m actually just not suited to work? So what do I do?

• carry on anyway? (Isn’t that what grown-ups do?)
• keep changing jobs in the hope that I find a company that suits? (Believe me, I don’t think anywhere could be more me than this lot.)
• change career altogether? (Yeah, like I’m good for anything else.)
• give up and stop forcing myself to be something I’m not?

Am I just someone who will always tend toward depression / maybe I don’t have it in me to be ‘happy’?

• why is that bad?
• are the tablets really to help me cope or just to mask the symptoms so other people don’t see how I am inside?
• why do people always seem to think that being with other people is something you need to do to be happy/feel better?
• I might not be ecstatic on my own, but I’m certainly not un-happy.

What has brought things to a head now?

• a gradual build up, reality setting in perhaps or maybe just an effect of the godawful windowless bunker I work in.
• my inability to cope with too much uncertainty – what is going to be on the call/what is going to be the rule for the day/what am I doing?
• a long run of co-incidental and random blues coinciding and piling in on top of the usual underlying fatigue and feelings of uselessness?
• biology. The crappiest reason of all. I said it as a joke to my doctor but, oddly, I do kind of keep coming back to that as an option.

After my Skype session I think about what we said. I reflect on my silences and where things may be going. The conversation included the usual well trodden paths – I am a failure, I am not worthy, yada yada bloody yada.

My body is failing me. Signs of fertility that I never wanted, and that always disgusted me, are on the wane. Am I just jealous of those young people with everything ahead of them? Is it their youth, their potential … their … attractiveness?

I work in an office where young men enjoy the opportunities that our environment has to offer (well, when we get out of the bunker). Even when I was here as a student I wasn’t someone that anyone looked at. I never have been. I never will be. I’m not saying I have a face to curdle milk but I’m not someone anyone would notice. A shadow, part of the furniture … just a voice on the phone.

And now I’m fading away even from that. No one notices that I’m here, or there, or gone.