Disappointment, Regret

I can't believe I spent nearly a week trying to write a letter to a client telling him that I can't do the job. The problem that kept holding me back from sending that e-mail is my tendency to scrutinize my own writing and trying to be eloquent (by all means, absurd, I know) with my language as much as possible, even if it is merely a formal letter meant for declining a client's job request/proposal. Excessive writer's pride, and that had cost me dearly: the client is very, very disappointed. Put yourself in his shoes, you'd be more or less as pissed off as he is when someone you've given the job to wasted a week of what could've been a completed job handed over by someone else.

The thing is, I can't help myself. I love to write, but I'm too eccentric to be practical with my words in the so-called 'working world'. Things like real estate just won't do for me, but again, overconfidence killed me, and it screwed me up good. My desire to create a strong freelancing career led me to become overconfident and I took more risk than I should. First major screw-up in my still developing career as a freelance writer.

I didn't sleep at all since Tuesday night, and as soon as I reached home by late Wednesday afternoon (after sending that dreaded e-mail), I overslept for nearly 10 hours. Woke up, and I still have a job to do. I've disappointed a client the first time, and I'm sure as hell would not want to repeat this with another client on the list, who had very much hired me for the job. The rolling ball needs to kept clear of steering into bad bumps.

Going Down

"You brought this on yourself"

I think I'm hitting another emotional rock bottom again. It's been going back and forth inside my head since late of last month that my progress to climb out of the pits of despair kept getting delayed, or perhaps the worse, that I am indeed descending back into that dreaded pit on my own will. Maybe I am becoming mentally dented that I started chasing after windmills and white whales thinking it was well worth the time. Even more to fear, what if my parents were right all along, and again, yet again, since my birth to my adulthood, that I will score another lifetime of zero against my parents?

I know four rejected job application isn't the end of days, out of many more job offers that popped up every week through friends and through my inbox, but it does severely affect my confidence to submit my resume for the fifth and sixth time. Besides, what good can an English capable person like me who could write creatively and speak the second language well in a system that demands mechanized symmetry in its workforce? The job market requires robots and biomechanical entities to emerge out of the assembly line with a shiny QC pass hologram. I became self-aware and left the assembly line on my own volition, consequently branded a defect by The System as a result.

As a self-aware entity, I should've been free to pursue my own path and expand beyond The System's pre-assembled destinations, but it seemed The System is keen to punish me for revolting against its conventions. With so much knowledge gained over the past five years selling goods online as well as picking up other skills such as setting up self-hosted websites and installing PHP (at its most basic levels, at least), it would be obvious that kickstarting my own online business seemed like the best path for me to take. Unfortunately, in comes The System with its unbreakable denial of service attacks, where my loan applications are either turned down or simply could not fulfill the required conditions. Again, I'm back in square one wasting off my dying youth in a tiny room. The System is God. The System is your Father. Treat The System as anything less and you'll end up like me.

What if everyone around me saw that I was speaking to walls and blank spaces, but were too afraid to tell me the truth, out of fear that I would spiral downwards even further? Maybe I am turning into Captain Martin Walker. Cognitive dissonance? No real free choices, only assumptions that it was?