Brief Detour for Despair

So I have a cunning plan, and I'm working through it, and it's fine, mostly.  (Right now I'm still feeling residually quite ill, which has probably upset my equanimity.)  But sometimes, I wonder if it's going to do any good.  Where am I going with all this?  What is it going to lead to?  Will it ever END?



(The whole point of the plan is that most of the probable outcomes are acceptable outcomes to me.  So mainly I think the uncertainty gets me sometimes; and when I read job ads, which, here, are ludicriously and unreasonably specific, I despair.)



All those years ago, I chose to step off the escalator of Your Career Here, Step Right Along.  Regardless of how I feel about the choice now, it's done and past taking back.  The thing about the Career Escalator is it can be a very straight path.  You know where you are, you can see where you're going, and you can see how to get there, more or less.



Well, I feel like I not only stepped off, but then wandered through an abandoned warehouse for a time, found a thrift shop where someone had bought 200 tons of scrap metal and sorted it by type*, paused to buy a large metal bowl, and then found myself blinking in the sunlight in the middle of one of those labyrinthine Brutalist government building**, with no idea where the escalators got to, or indeed, if I was willing to find another.


I'll let you know when I find my way back out.  It's somewhere past the disassembled washers and those five tubas with no valves.




* This is a real thing near me.  Imagine 15 feet of Benares ware, six disassembled tubas, 27 identical lawn ornaments, 100 feet of bicycles....

** I have also been mildly lost in this actual building.