This is serial. I've lost a couple of jobs in a row from this.

Luckily I still have a reputation earned from some years ago. Plus, I interview well. People still give me jobs.

Managers don't seem to have a response here. In my experience most managers only have one bit of information devoted to programmer ability (ROCKSTAR xor SUCKS). They have alternately told me to try harder, or threatened then fired me.

I had felt like I was deceiving employers so I took a nine month break and did an artistic project. However even with a whole day to do nothing but that, I wasn't able to achieve much. I worked with a small number of people and lef that project, and it got done, but not very well, even though it was my "full time" job. Still, I felt that I had had enough of a sabbatical, and also had made some progress in psychotherapy, so I returned to the workforce, only to run into the same problems I had before. I now think the psychotherapy was not addressing the right problems -- it's more about what I do than how I feel. And it's clear my attempt at a sabbatical didn't clear up the fundamental issues.

I have friends that are able to learn programming languages on the side or take blacksmithing courses and otherwise have full and exciting lives. In other words they have reserve energy. I am so behind on just the basic requirements for my project, I feel I can't do any of this. I schedule more and more and more and more time for work and yet still nothing gets done.

As for happiness with work; I have a pattern of working with codebases that are in great need of refactoring and I am feeling a great need to stretch out and do something more original. So that is a problem.

That said, the guy who sits next to me has enough energy to actually satisfy those needs both at work (gets managers to agree to major refactorings) and also code up some great things in his spare time. Whereas I'm perenially playing catch-up and my code is ugly.