Day two of advent.

I never meant to become a corporate whore. It just gradually crept up on me and one day I realised I’d ‘taken the king’s shilling’ or ‘drunk from the poison chalice’.

I only ever wanted to be good at my job. Let’s face it, with a failing marriage I needed something to build my self-esteem.

Over the years, the most difficult thing about the job has been struggling with the issue of how to maintain some kind of home life while doing this job. I suppose I didn’t really mind when work encroached on my home life until I met David. No matter how many hours I once worked, they were just a way of avoiding home and avoiding the issue that I couldn’t bring myself to face.

When I started seeing DM, I promised myself I would find a way to create a better balance between work and home. For a while I achieved some kind of uneasy truce. Before we lived together, it was easier to hide the hours I work and the amount of worry and stress my job brings. In recent years he has seen much of the less glamorous side of the kind of life I lead. The long hours, being away from home, constant worries about work and being wracked with guilt every time I get myself extricated for long enough to have some time to myself.

There are two things that I do for no-one but me - that are sacrosanct – the Spurs and this diary – no matter what else I do, these two things remain priorities. I know it’s selfish to insist on my Saturday afternoons at WHL but they are so important to me. Thankfully David loves going now too so at least I can spend those hours with him too.

I try to get away from the office without staying too late and I try to shed my work woes in the car or on the train. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t – I still get home with the cares of the world on my shoulders. Sometimes in bed, DM will ‘brush my shoulders’ with his hands – a strangely symbolic gesture to let me know it’s time to let go of whatever is eating me up and to get some sleep. I cry when he does this thing that seems like such a small gesture when expressed here but in my life it is huge.

This year, my balance has tipped heavily in the favour of my job and I have been struggling to make sense of it all. Each day, I get out of bed and the pains in my chest start, then comes the coughing that my doc says is stress, then comes the cold sweat when I remember all of the people I let down the day before because I couldn’t do any more.

I am afraid, deeply afraid that I will die of a heart attack before I manage to get to fifty. I am equally afraid of dying old and alone because I’ve spent so much time working that DM has got fed up of living with a ghost and has found himself a real, living, breathing woman to keep him company.

Most of all though, I only ever wanted to be good at what I do and I know with absolute certainty that I no longer am good at what I do. My performance is inhibited by exhaustion and the inability to keep all the balls in the air. I let my colleagues down, I let my company down, I let my friends down, I let DM and the animals down but most of all, I let ME down. There is a human being somewhere within this shell…….in 2005 I am determined the human being in me will find its way back to the surface.