I have a good job. My pay is way above what nearly any other 22-year-old I know earns. The work is challenging and a good career move. The management and co-workers are reasonable and amiable. By any sane logic I should be happy, contented, and productive.

Instead, I am unhappy, slow, inefficient, and horribly unproductive.

Why am I posting this to the loop? Because the emotions that are blocking me from working are the SAME ones, feeling for feeling, wound for wound, that push me to eat. Waves of hurt and abandonment, sudden losses of energy, despair attacks, uncertainties and doubts hit me all day long. Working while under the grip of these feelings is often out of the question.

Often I do not eat the lunch I bring with me, but dash over to certain restaurants and binge for lunch instead. This often (literally) weighs me down and makes me exhausted in the afternoon.

This is not like me. In university I was an exemplary student, and whizzed through courses while other students floundered. Now I am the one floundering while my co-workers produce more output in a day than I do in a week.

Rather surprisingly, my boss has not said anything to me, though he probably will soon. I cannot but suspect that he is disappointed in my performance. I know I am very disappointed in it. Quitting work is out of the question, however; I need the income. I am taking an antidepressant but it has shown no effect as yet.

It is a terrifying feeling to be in front of a computer screen and be unable to bring my mind to the task in front of me. Thoughts wander to almost anything else, to food very often, or to memories of the past. I try to shake the lethargy but it does not go away more than temporarily.

No one in the office notices my mood; for sitting back looking at my screen appears as if I am thinking or planning out work. No one would guess that I often feel as if a pincer is crushing my heart inside me, like a demon bent on my destruction.

I am living a lie. I am not the bright, shrewd employee I promised my employer at my job interview a few months ago. I am instead a mediocre employee with spotty performance. Effort and thought seem virtually impossible, and thought and deed increasingly unreachable.

And in this wasteland, the only comfort is, you guessed it, food. On occasion I have read and written on this loop from work (for, not having a computer at home, my Internet access is entirely at work) but, reluctantly, I must confess that this has not succeeded in erasing the stasis and its death-like embrace. My life is becoming unmanageable; hopeless, helpless, powerless.

Oasis, Aug. 9, 1996.