Dear Secret Writer,
Firstly, I commend you for recognizing that your job is no longer fulfilling and that you want to make a change in your life. And please take my comments as constructive criticism, with my best intentions. But I will be honest in my responses, as I think you need to hear a few items of truth.
Your solutions are band-aid approaches and do not solve the major issue. The fact is that you no longer enjoy your job and it's not fulfilling you in any meaningful way.
So, in order to solve this big issue you need to ask yourself the hard question: what do you like doing? I never heard you answer that question in your story. All of those extraneous things like "finding the happy moments", etc, come out of living a fulfilling life. They are not moments that have to be injected artificially into a life that has dulled your senses.
Who am I to speak with authority? I know because it took the better part of 5 years for me to finally cast off all of my senseless 9-5 jobs and get serious about who I was and what I was naturally good at. I also wrote a book about this process.
The process of casting off fake work personas and getting really serious about finding out what you want in life is not an easy process. It's grueling actually. There's nothing fun about it. There are no daisies, no fun moments. It's full of pain, suffering and lots of well, more pain.
I managed to write a book while I had a full-time job. I forced myself out of fear, to get something accomplished while I still had a job.
Nowhere in your story do I hear you say what you want to do. You need to start working on something that you enjoy. If you don't yet know what you like to do, I suggest you join a group like Choose Yourself, a group run by James Altucher. That group helped me focus in on becoming my true self, not the one that showed up to my soul-sucking job every day. The people in that group are supportive and they help each other, for the most part. But it will be up to you to decide what it is to generate happiness within you. Until you start getting specific, nothing much will change. But you're at the point of recognizing that something is wrong. This is the first step. You're in the beginning. What you do next, well, we will be waiting for that.
RE: SECRET WRITER: The Working Dead, Eating My Soul Alive