All by myself ...

I love my friends.

I really do love them but sometimes I am just so jealous and envious of them and their serious relationships/marriage that I feel guilty for it.

It isn't that I want to be them or have their lives. I just want the support that they have.

Yes my friends are there for me. They listen to me and offer me their advice and support. They're my family and I wouldn't swap them for anyone. But at the end of the evening I go home.

Alone.

And the fear that I have at the moment doesn't vanish the moment I leave them. In fact as soon as I am by myself it increases tenfold.

And then there is no one there to hold me. There is no one there to wipe away my tears. There is no one there to talk to me until 3am in the morning about what I am going to do.

I'm doing this by myself.

No matter how they all say that they are there for me they just can't relate.

I don't have someone else who can pay rent for the month. If I run out of money there isn't someone else who can buy the weekly groceries and treat me to a drink to cheer me up. MY debt is just that, MY debt, and there isn't someone else there to help me clear it.

I wish I had the support that they have. No one wants a crying Miss M on the phone at midnight and I know that I can't really phone them every single time I am slowly losing it by myself.

I just wish I wasn't alone right now.

Welcome to the jungle

There is the smell of fear in my office at present.

When the bottom dropped off the banking system around the world last year I never thought that it would affect me. In the newspapers each day we were reading horror stories of people losing their jobs, images of bankers leaving their offices with their belongings in cardboard boxes were transfixing us but again, I just never saw it happening to me.

Now one by one the Freelancers in my office are having their contracts ended. There is a freeze on commissions from all the channels and because of this new contracts and hiring are just not happening.

What small jobs there are I now have to compete with my friends for. I have to compete with the people who I've been working with for almost 2 years and it's horrible.

I feel exception guilt when I get called in to go and meet with one company and my colleague doesn't.

To make matters worse we have a departmental meeting tomorrow where the near future of our company is going to be explained to us. Staff are foreseeing redundancies and the gossip is that they are going to try and get rid of as many people as possible, bring the staff down to skeleton and then start rehiring people for smaller contracts if and when they actually get commissions.

All I can say about this is go out shopping people! Buy food, buy household products, buy clothing and buy music! My lively hood depends on advertisers putting money down for slots and unless you guys start buying their products it is never going to happen!

You all have my permission to go shopping.