kernel panic

The undercurrent of my thoughts is suffering a long, slow, unfocused distress. My achievements have slipped behind my goals so far in the last year that I can't reconcile my effort with them anymore. My career has been the loss leader for everything else; last year at this time I took a big step and left the corporate in-house creative services department that I built in order to work at a small studio that needed a creative director. It looked good on paper but was a fucking disaster -- the owner was stealing from the operating fund and the studio closed three months after I started. I was unemployed for five months, floundering through ideas about what to do next, thinking that maybe I wanted to get the hell out of the creative/production business anyway. All of that thinking led me exactly nowhere, though I tried to be upbeat and optimistic and look at it as an opportunity instead of a total clusterfuck. My wife also did not work, so we were just barely stringing together mortgage payments with the little freelance work I did and unemployment benefits. I finally, desperately, accepted a shit job with a fairly stable company in order to have SOME income and benefits. As it turns out, the folks who hired me apparently had no idea how or what they were going to use me for and basically abandoned me in a cube for the last four months.

So, I have had a lot of time to atrophy and think depressing thoughts and basically get nothing done. I am getting to the point where having no direction and no real motivation other than a paycheck is starting to make me anxious; for the last four months I have just looked at this job as kind of a break from the hard, constant work and stress I used to suffer, but now I realize that it's stifling any more comprehensive analysis of the situation or executive problem-solving functions in my brain.

The rest of my life is fine; my wife is enjoying success in graduate school and in her part-time job, and the kids are great. But I am getting run down by my situation at work. I don't have the energy to go start over as a graphic janitor, thinking I might be a creative lead in this company someday. I need something ELSE.