Transforming one melody to make a whole movement

Economic use of musical material is one of my favorite creative challenges—that is creating lots of variety that you can trace back to a single source

I'm a little stuck on writing the music I'm supposed to be writing, so I'm going to write a few words about what I'm composing to see if I can learn more about what the music is supposed to be.

I'm putting the finishing touches on a piece that traces the path of a quite (emotionally) bad day that gets worse and worse. Eventually sleep and dreams bring a wiping of the slate clean and the following day is something of the previous day's opposite. I'm struggling with the first movement—a musical depiction of what happens when one thing goes poorly that you begin to obsess over: it multiplies into manifold versions, causing you to see the whole world more negatively for a time.

Here is the initial idea, a morose lyric figure played over a lightly syncopated vamp. 

This negative idea sticks and like a virus begins to generate copies and variants of itself in an angry way. Below are the first few:

The first variation applies a bit of rhythmic variation and diminution, with different articulation giving the music an imperious character:

The second variation, hot on the heels of the first, displaces the initial idea by an eighth note, causing it to dance a little, while applying inversion and speeding up the back half of the initial idea:

The third variation applies a bit of rhythmic displacement with rhythmic liquidation (stripping music of characteristic rhythm) and augmentation:

Each variant is introduced in quick succession and then they are immediately played together, building on one another. Here’s what that all sounds like put together:

The music subsides just a bit and makes way for a new variation that brings back the initial mood but with perhaps a bit more nobility. It gradually acquires some stateliness as it's accompanied by fragments of the initial idea, building to something that begins to sound like a way forward and out before hitting a wall, a new and more aggressive variant emerging from the marching triplets that were in the background. 

The variants all combine again and build, this time tied together by the most aggressive variant cascading through the different voices, driven by a dissonant cluster groove in the lowest voices. Things build to an unbearable level before grinding to a dissonant halt.

As a story and progression, this all works well, and I find the variants each to be interesting and propulsive on their own and in combination. Yet there are a few moments where my internal compass is not pointing to yes. So now that I've written about what I'm writing, it's time to get back to writing...!