SpoilerComing up on four years ago, I entered a relationship with a man. Between two and three years ago, we began living together, and not long thereafter, he proposed. We planned to have the wedding when we had the money and stability to go through with it and still have a safety net afterwards; between both of us holding jobs for the last year and the situation in Washington, I felt it was finally time to move forward with our plans: I was going to re-propose on Christmas and hopefully be married in the coming summer. A month ago, he left me. Contact since then has been minimal and cold, and reconciliation seems highly unlikely. There's so many things I feel like I ought to be be saying, but ultimately it's just a profound sense of loss that I can't gloss over with words. It's been weeks and weeks, and I sometimes still feel like I'm no closer to dealing with this in an emotionally mature manner than I was the night he left; I can't stop dwelling on could have changed, what went wrong, how I can fix a situation that is increasingly obviously unfixable. Some days it's just a recurring pang and an uncomfortable confrontation of a change that I hate with all my heart; others, it's a literally-constant dwelling and endless rumination that I am uncharacteristically incapable of compartmentalizing or setting aside. Rhetorically, I'd like to be able to say that that powerlessness is worse than the loss itself, but... It's just another factor that makes it harder to bear. I'm being stripped of my pretensions of character and strength in the face of adversity on top of losing the single thing I valued most in my life. It's not a feeling I relish, and I can't find a moment of peace from myself.

Most of you who would be reading this know by now that I work at a solar panel manufacturer. Like many business in the area – especially in light industry – the company I work for gains employees almost exclusively from a temp-to-hire program, even for a surprising number of specialized positions and certainly for line workers. My contract guarantees me employment for eighteen months, barring incompetence or other firable misconduct obviously, unless I'm hired on as a full employee before it expires. However, irrespective of my consistently glowing performance reviews, the company has been under a hiring freeze since before I began my contract there, which at present shows no sign of lifting any time soon. I only have six months left on my contract, and very little in the way of prospects if the company's fortunes don't turn around. It's difficult to believe they will: in the third quarter of 2012, they lost closer to two hundred million dollars than one; intentional attrition has reduced our headcount to less than a third of the level it was at when I began; we're running well under half the capacity we have to produce and constantly dwindling to even less than that; a couple of days before my fiancé left, it was suddenly announced with no warning or prelude that a number of cuts to staff were being made. Administrative, engineering, R&D, HR, and logistics were all hit, many of them nearly halved in one go; among those who were removed were both of my supervisors, including the man who was pleased enough with me as an employee to specifically say I should use him as a reference, unprompted. Even janitorial staff and duties have been reduced in an effort to pinch every penny for as long as possible. I am currently at the tail end of a two-week shutdown of the plant; a vice president insists up and down that the shutdown is just necessary for our equipment's maintenance, and in no way indicative of anything, but this is a difficult assertion to believe when there have never been shutdowns for maintenance before. I'm constantly afraid of losing my job and having none to replace it with; even with the resources I'm no longer going to be spending on a wedding, I can't survive unemployment for long, and I worry that I don't have a lot of options.

The last several months have seen everything constant in my life start to collapse; between aunts dying of cancer, uncles having strokes, my father's rapidly-accelerating descent into schizophrenia and alcoholism, the inconstancy of a job I can't rely on and the inability to find a more stable one, and the gradual dissolution of most of my social circle through schedules or movement or simple disassociation, all culminating in the loss of the man I thought I would be with for the rest of my life, I feel like I have next to nothing I can count or rely on. Change I seem to be too immature to deal with has snowballed into a complete reorganization of my life this last year, all seemingly for the worse. Probably the biggest reason I can't resign myself to acceptance and start working to improve what I can is that literally every single goal I have in life has been rendered impossible or taken completely out of my hands; I no longer have any control over anything significant in my life, and I have nothing to strive for or work towards. I've always had something I could call an aspiration until now, but at this point all I can do is keep existing and hope something gives. I don't know what to do with myself, largely because there isn't anything I need to be doing. I'm just drifting aimlessly and waiting, and I have no idea how to deal with a complete absence of direction; I need something to direct myself, and I just don't have it.

So if I've been taciturn, testy, or hateful to you in the last couple of months, I'm sorry. If I've made a commitment to you that I can no longer force myself to continue, I'm sorry. If my inability to deal with my problems and emotions in an adult way has made me unpleasant or a chore to be around, I'm sorry. The depths of my apology are exceeded only by those of my gratitude towards the friend I've leaned on since things started to sour for me, and my regret that I'm probably going to continue to be a chore of an associate for some time. I'm sorry for a thousand stupid things to dozens of people that deserved better. I hope things can change; I'm afraid I won't be able to make them.

I'm just... sorry.