legrandefromage wrote:
Here I sit, at the bottom.
So, car-less, job-less, income-less, talent-less no-mark
Would invite him round to dinner to meet your parents?

Been there, done that, got T-shirt etc...
I was in the same boat as you many years ago. I sold up my stuff and did a ski season in Austria to escape the winter blues. I was trained as a graphic designer and I had worked in television and photography, but there were no jobs unless I moved to London, which I didn't want to do.
I was grafting on building sites and packing boxes. The skills I had were worthless and the media industry will gladly have you work for nowt for forever and a day. The yoof of today think "internships" are a new thing, but I remember them from years ago and they didn't work even then.
I can't really say that the recession is worse this time round, as back in the day there wasn't even the internet (that has created a lot of jobs, but then again it has changed careers too!) but the country will soon sink if any more visitors come here for a long holiday. Employers will choose the cheapest solution. Talent and skill has nothing to do with it.
I soon found out whom my real friends were when I had no money. No one calls, no one is interested in you, you get all melancholy and it seems worse in the winter.
The doc offered me anti-depresants. I said I would rather have a job. The job centre couldn't give me a job. The only one whom can help you - is YOU!
Screw anti-depresants. They mask the illness, they are not a cure. Some people use them and get on OK, that's your choice, but as I said, I went to Austria doing the ski season stuff. Then Italy, then France, then Spain. I worked for a couple of camping companies after that. I eventually returned to Blighty when I had no money and slept at friend's houses. On returning home I looked at all my old "friends" and saw them all sat in the same pose with cobwebs hanging off their nose and they all looked like the living dead. Fatter, mortgaged and taxed to the hilt, more kids, the list goes on. One of my ol' "friends" was now bunked up with my ex. I laughed so hard when I found out because I knew what a bunny boiler she was!

I saw him a few months later and he had lost about three stone and looked as if she had sucked the life out of him. Literally!
I had been skiing, snowboarding, drinking, paragliding, microlighting, riding in the Alps on my bike, seeing the Tour on Alpe d'Huez, running naked in the forest, tasted many a foreign woman (I seem to get on with them better than the home crowd of leggings/tattoos/stillettos brigade that GB knocks out) and the worst thing I ever did was coming home to this tax draining dump called Great Britain.
I've been back a few years and I've had very good and dismal times. I see these whipersnappers that are young, dumb and full of cum, stabbing each other in the back, just to get a meaningless promotion with no pay rise attached. I blame the likes of The Apprentice on the Beeb for creating these prats. I recently watched the version with the teenagers in it and it horrified me how they copied the adult characters with the way they spoke to each other. It was like Mini-Sugar-Frankenstien's morphing into our future bosses, talking to people like something on the bottom of the their shoe and thinking that is how you should behave in business. Frightening!

I doubt I'll ever work for a company again.
As other's have said,
don't blame yourself.I sold myself and my classic Scalextric collection to the devil to get a job. People will still drop dung from you from a great height even when you reach your goal. You are not alone and you will come out of this mess and you will be better and wiser for it.
I am now a freelance graphic designer with a multitude of skills in the bag and little work. Ten years on I have a mortgage, a loving girlfriend and I'm selling my possessions on ebay to get by. I can see I am turning into an old fart with no get up and go. Hence I am now doing my own art and I am looking to hold an exhibition next year and get back to France (not to return) as soon as I can.
The moral of my story is: KEEP MOVING.
Chin up matey. You'll laugh about it one day
