Burned out

Apparently there is a limit to how much  the mind can handle.  After working for (company x) for two years, and being given virtually impossible, and paradoxical tasks near the end, by their IT head (person x) the contract was terminated. After two years of successfully providing them with the technologies they wanted and needed they virtually ended my career with a negative rating on ODesk which didn’t reflect my work for them over the two years, but only reflected their feelings about me at the time of termination. I attempted to dispute this rating with ODesk on grounds that it was slanderous, but ODesk refuses to allow any disputes of their ratings.

From there I spent 3 months looking for work.  I ended up taking a 22% paycut and working half the hours I was working just to survive.  The new work was outside my chosen field of web development so I have now been out of the web development industry for nearly 8 months. The company I’ve been working for has closed it’s doors, supposedly it isn’t permanent, but who knows.  Making up for 8 months out of the industry has been nothing short of hell. I’ve had to learn Ruby, Python, Rails, Django, and some Magento and AngularJS, but I never expected that I would have forgotten many of the function names from other programming languages, but that is exactly what has happened. In the middle of an interview process I was ambushed with questions about the names of various PHP functions and configuration variables which I’ve somehow forgotten.  Apparently that was the last straw for my brain as it triggered a mental breakdown.  I have a severe headache, I can’t focus, and when I try to program my mind is going completely blank. Who knows if I will ever recover, but I’ve been backed into a corner with no way out.