doubting my sanity

..I'm not in a good place.  Today, I had the blood drain from my head, from my arms and down my legs and soak away out of my body, leaving me shaking with shock and feeling betrayed.  Betrayed by this machine called the computer, that I trust to keep all of my documents, my work product, the things that happen to define in an undeniably significant portion who I am a member of society.
I thought I had lost a document I've been working on for the past week, a draft of a submission due next Friday, mere 8 days from now.  I couldn't find it anywhere.  I had distinct memories of when I had worked on it, last night...no, I mean early this morning, before I switched gears to draft a document that needs to be turned in tomorrow.  I felt insane, like I had fallen completely off my rocker and rolled a mile away before I realized that I wasn't right in my head.  I had distinct memories of changing the title of the document from "...OUTLINE..." to "...draft."  I even remembered working on it before I attended a call with an expert on the other side of the planet, at 11:30 pm, and then coming back to it after the call.  If it weren't for the tale-tell signs that the call occurred and I hadn't imagined or dreamed it all, in the form of my hand-written notes during the call, I would have just accepted it as fact that I hadn't actually done any work but somehow imagined about 10 hours worth of drafting work, and perhaps another 10 hours of client meetings and 10 hours of reviewing documents in 3 different languages (1 which I'm fluent in, 1 which I can read with some difficulty and 1 which I have no clue how to decipher).  Thank God for hand-written notes, visible evidence to keep me grounded...even as my head floats away into the clouds of self doubt and utter confusion.

So, why did I react so viscerally, shaking, crying and confused and lost and exasperated and devastated by the loss of a document that wasn't even close to completion and even further from perfection?  B/c I'm not in a good place.  I lost my cool, my hold on reality, the assurance that I am not imagining things, in reaction to something that happens every once in a while to everyone who relies on technology.  Why?  Perhaps b/c I'm weak-minded; b/c I'm actually teetering on the edge of sanity and I am vaguely aware of my instability; b/c I haven't eaten a meal all day for fear of upsetting my sensitive stomach; b/c I've been consuming more caffeinated liquids than water or any other fluids in the past weeks; maybe b/c I haven't had a single day away from work in the past few weeks; b/c I haven't been feeling well but was "too busy" to actually rest, diagnose what's wrong or recover; b/c I haven't been able to sleep from stress, nervousness, physical discomforts; perhaps b/c I haven't exercised or moved or stretched my body for months; or b/c my "bosses" keep increasing in ranks and numbers, pushing down piles and mountains of insurmountable work but no one seems to want to do the grunt work.
Or maybe all those are just excuses for a disorganized, uncontrolled, directionless life.  Do I have work-life balance?  Don't even know what that means anymore.  I feel like any other job would be a paid vacation to me at this point.

But the bottom line is that something is not well.  I'm not being fed and nurtured as a whole human being, and the imbalance is breaking my poor body and threatening my addling mind.  The author of Ecclesiastes, the famed King Solomon of ancient Israel, notes that it's "meaningless!  meaningless!"  that it's all a "chasing after the wind."  That imagery holds a crazy person whose last few screws have twisted out of their grooves and have long ago fallen out as the person endeavored to catch the wind.  Is that person me?  Why am I here?  What am I doing?  What keeps me here and what am I supposed to learn from this phase of my life?  That life, indeed, is meaningless?  That everything I do is a chasing after the winds?  Wisdom is meaningless, fame is meaningless, prestige is meaningless, the acceptance and approval of others is meaningless, a great work product is meaningless?  Perhaps, maybe so...I just don't know.  But I know one thing.  "all is not well...something is rotten in the state of Denmark."  (Hamlet, Act I, Scenes 2 and 4)