So I should be celebrating, right? Right?

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Okay, taking a step back:

Ten years ago I had a mentally ill husband who'd completely fallen apart, a young child, and a history of low-wage part-time day-job work. My days were spent in fear of the next crazy thing that'd fall out of the sky, the next emergency I'd have to fix. Also the fear that my husband would do something insane and leave us totally broke.

Today I have a house with apple trees in the backyard, custody of an older happy/healthy child, and an increasingly prestigious writing career built the hard way, freelancing and pulling all-nighters. I'm involved in the creation and steering of nationally prestigious academic programs; I teach things I want to teach and am paid to drink with friends at conferences I want to go to; there's enough top-of-market freelance work for me that when faculty started maltreating me in my department, I was able to take my marbles and go home. I had a hand in shaping the new GED, and now it looks like I'll be helping to write a new college-entrance exam (and no, I won't tell anything about it). People have been running to do creative work with me, and last year I was allowed to play with a $10K Leica just because I said it'd give us great results (and it did).

I'm also seriously going to bits. Not only do I have zero help of any kind, I don't have time to make these fantasy helpful friendships that therapists like to posit for me. I'm not cut out for doing this much work, and more keeps landing in the inbox and cropping up at meetings. It's tough to say no, because I really do need the money. Half a continent away, my mom's in the process of robbing my 90-year-old grandma after having shanghaied her and left her in a nursing home -- I'm trying to get her back into her apartment with adequate nursing care before my mom sells the place out from under her. (I'm not surprised my mom's doing this -- she also abandoned my brother and left him homeless when he was a kid, and has never bothered doing much for or with her grandchildren -- but it just seems unnecessary. My grandma's state seems to provide for in-home care under Medicaid. Maybe it involved what my mom thought was too much admin/oversight work, stuff she'd have to do.) She did it without saying anything to me, either -- I had to call a friend of my grandmother's to find out what was going on, where my grandma had gone. Which pissed off my mom; who knows why, could be all sorts of things, any of them ending in "made her look bad".

I should be enjoying this job stuff, right? Scaling heights in an accidental career? But it's not what I'm cut out for, at all. I actually never thought it was smart to do this kind of thing, working too much, bothering with prestige -- it's just a function of needing to make money for now and needing not to feel like I'm spending my life in a bus station, doing work that boring and meaningless just to make a buck.

Boy, am I glad I'll be doing fuck-all for my mom when she's on her way out the door. That's the only sense of relief I get from any of this.

You should read John Robison's book if you haven't already. He lost a lot of oppertunities because of nagging self doubt.

What do you want to do? Ever talk to a vocational therapist?

what I want to do? Have a nice part-time job in a non-chain-horror bookstore. Those are very nice, lived like that for years. That and fall asleep midday in a park. Unfortunately you can't make enough doing that to support a middle-class child through a middle-class childhood. (The bookstores don't so often exist anymore, either.) Half-assed min-wage interesting-project student jobs are also nice, but same problem there, so I'm now the giver of such jobs, not receiver.

I stopped working last night at 1:30 am. Students were emailing me until 12:45 am. University staff were emailing until 10:30 pm, and freelance clients were emailing until 9:15 pm. I got up at 7:30 am to help the child get ready for school, and am now going to try to catch a couple hours' sleep before I have to go teach.

Yikes!

My reading is that the demand for your services is beginning to outstrip the supply (i.e. your ability to keep up with it all while also staying sane).

Reducing workload would result in an undesirably reduced revenue stream, so.... a classic supply/demand model might suggest consideration of increasing the price of services provided. The hypothesis there being increased prices/rates would cause demand to back-off while (hopefully) maintaining an acceptable level of income.

Right, the Thatcherisation of my services. (Sleep, not happening.) That's starting to happen. I'm probably one of the best-paid non-celeb adjuncts in the country. I've raised my editorial rate to something that looks shocking to me, but is probably anemic on the coasts. The problem is that full-freelance/adjunct, where you never know where the money's coming from three months from now...you know, I did that for years, and I just can't anymore. There's no knowing when the bottom will drop out of the market entirely (as it did, for instance, in 2008 -- I wound up unemployed for half a year, and may I say that exactly no one stepped up to help me and my daughter, despite my asking for help). So half my time is given to the university at laughable wages, but it's not nothing, and it comes with benefits (admittedly less interesting now that OCare exists) and the knowledge that universities crumble slowly even in hard times; it's a sinecure.

The other difficult thing is that to keep freelance clients, you have to keep saying yes.

I also know now that my boss will put up with my being difficult -- to a point -- because if I go, she's unlikely to get permission to rehire on that salary line. It'll just go away. So it's something > nothing for her. It doesn't hurt that I've helped drag in a few hundred thousand dollars and done other nice things for the department. What it means though is that I don't have to work like I'm being paid 3x the money, which is what I'd normally do. I can hang out, socialize, do a spot of work, take off. There's no hiding the fact that this is what I'm doing, since they've already seen me at full throttle, but they're not paying for full throttle.

I can relate a bit. When I was in business for myself I had to keep a base level of steady but low-margin work going on just to meet fixed expenses and make sure I could keep the doors open in a down-turn, and rely upon higher margin work to build reserves and provide for more discretionary expenses. Thank goodness it worked well enough to see me through the 2008 debacle, though not without struggles.

I don't have any advice... I just wanted to say that I understand, professionally and personally.

I really can't relate. The closest experience I've had was my mother signing me up to fix her office friend's computers. Always put more computers into my lap than I could handle at one time. But it sounds to me like you already mentioned what would help. Help! An assistant, or a student. Neighbor or likeminded peer. You need someone to help take care of certain things, so your attention can be put to what really matters.

Perhaps an ad in the papers?

I understand where you're coming from.. I chose competitive employment, to pursue my dream of being an exec chef at a quality place.... I'm stuck as a line cook at a chain, I've turned down amazing jobs due to anxiety and stress....I sincerely wish I could achieve my potential.

It really breaks you down as a person. What do we have left after that drive is gone? The light is out? *sigh* I'm sorry I can't be more positive. It's so visceral and intense of a dark place in the wounded soul, for me... I can't seem to ever really be happy. That nagging self-doubt... maybe it's just reminding me that I have no self, just all these pieces that won't fit together properly..

That does sound pretty great, and maddening at the same time. There's probably a vacation that you could take with your daughter which you would both enjoy a lot.