You know you're off to a shitty start in a new year when you're in your boss's office crying by 10 a.m. on your first day back at work.

And there's nothing that makes a tough Girlie madder than having her frustration turn into tears in a business situation. I so hate when that happens, dammit!!

But, unfortunately, that's exactly how things often turn out when I'm tired, overworked, and feeling like I'm trapped in a vicious pool of quicksand that is rapidly sucking me under. Problem is, it's happened more often over the past eighteen months or so than I would have liked.

Don't get me wrong: my boss is not cold or unsympathetic - but like most men, he immediately starts tossing out "solutions". Which isn't necessarily bad, but he's on the outside looking in, and isn't the one dealing with the day-to-day nightmare, and therefore, doesn't understand why for every solution he brings up, I get more and more frustrated because it's a solution that only involves more work for me.

So I end up losing it because no matter how hard I try to make him understand the overwhelming nature of what is going on, he doesn't understand exactly why his answers don't resolve things for me.

I'll go into his office for help with something, and walk out with five more tasks to accomplish, because he always takes things into a direction far beyond what the original problem was about. Instead of helping me find my way out of this hole of overwork, he ends up shouldering me with more projects to tackle and procedures to implement, when my mind already won't rest at night for fear of forgetting something that must be done.

And again - he's not a bad guy, or an ogre - just not at all familiar or aware of what a normal day is like in my department. And I don't know how to make him understand the reality of it all.

I literally spent all day (when I wasn't in his office, watery-eyed during my futile attempts to get through to him) working on one stupid system problem that screwed up a payroll recently. Not one of the things I intended to work on today got done - and there were a lot of them that really needed to be done before next week's payroll.

I'm floundering, flailing, and failing - and it's making me miserable. The irony here is that I like where I work. I like what I do. I just don't like how much of it there is, or how frantic my days have become. I never walk out the door at the end of the day feeling that I accomplished much of anything that was significant. In fact, most evenings, the only feeling I have as I leave is the subtle lifting of the huge, heavy weight that I have carried around in the center of my chest for the past nine hours. For a short while, I know I can go home to peace and quiet, not have the phone ring every few seconds, or another email land in my inbox, with yet another consuming issue that will only cause me to get sidetracked from the 20 or so other things I should have been doing instead.

I feel inadequate, incompetent, and incoherent. I find myself on the phone stumbling through words, having to stop and breathe and start over because I can't seem to communicate effectively. It's a wonder people haven't started rumors that I'm on drugs or drunk at work, that's how loopy I've become.

And while it's nice to come home to the silence and serenity of my solo sanctuary, at the same time, I'd give anything to have someone here to greet me and hold me and kiss me, to tell me that I'm not incompetent, I'm not inadequate - I'm just overworked and underloved at the moment.

Someone who wouldn't laugh at my puffy eyes, but would instead bring me a cold washcloth to soothe them.

Ah well - there's no one here to do that for me but me. And I have to say, it really, really hurts right now: to feel completely alone, and to remember that you've felt that way for most of the last 30 years of your life, and to realize that it's probably going to be that way for the next 30 years - because you're just not the kind of woman who'll choose a companion merely to avoid facing the emptiness of your heart and home.

So, what to do?

Guess I'll just get up and run the faucet over that washcloth now, before I start crying all over again.