Feeling Inadequate

As I listen to the inane banter of my co-workers, I am surfing Craigslist for jobs--both Chicago and the San Fransisco Bay Area. I am getting increasingly depressed by the fact that I am trapped--in so many ways, and I just cannot see my way out of it at the moment. The economy is in a shambles, and with little savings, it would be insane to move to another city where I would have no job. Here, I have a paid internship--close enough to a job and it pays, so that is something HUGE right now, and I have a boyfriend who pays most of the bills thereby enabling me to not only get by on my meager salary, but even have money for things like books and the occasional meal out. These are LARGE detriments to my deranged desire to throw my shit in a U-Haul and run screaming for California. I really want to be there. I should be there. I could have been there this summer, but here I am still in Chicago. Trapped. With no one to blame but myself and my cowardice.

I applied for some part-time jobs recently in the hopes of getting some additional income. This would enable me to save money faster and get out of here faster, but so far, only one interview and one rejection. Sigh. At the rate I am saving money now, it will be sometime in 2010 before I can move to California. I will have lost my last grains of sanity long before then. I am in a dead-end relationship with a good man, but I don't love him anymore, and despite my feeble efforts to rekindle the love, that fire died long ago and it is not showing any signs of sparking up again. I have a good internship, I guess, but I am increasingly getting restless and bored. I learn how to do things pretty fast, and once I have mastered a position, unless I am able to find new and more exciting things to do (invariably meaning more work), I start feeling sleepy and dead. I guess that is par for the course right now. Dead inside. That is how I feel. Very inadequate, trapped, motionless, emotionless, hopeless. I truly don't want to feel this way.

Even my sister makes me feel inadequate. She is younger than me, and now that she has a steady girlfriend and a better job and all of the things that come with being superior to me (at least in her mind), I never hear from her or see her. She lives across the street from me too. This makes me very sad. She is with her girlfriend's family all of the time. She speaks of them like they are her only family, and it hurts. Why can't she have both? My mom says she is behaving this way because they have things they can give her that we cannot (free airline tickets, better Christmas presents, etc.). This makes me even sadder. I have always been there for my sister, to the detriment of my job, my relationship with my boyfriend, my safety, never once complaining because that is what family is all about, right? Is there anything else that I could give her besides my love?

As the weather gets colder and grayer, so does my mood. I am falling into Winter's icy grasp, and she is there to wrap her cold arms around me and strangle any remaining sunshine out of my bloodstream. Why am I so cold all the time?