I can hear Homeland Security knocking on my door even as I type.

My key to survival is to have something to look forward to. New play, new crush, new Wii game, anything that makes doing things you don’t want to do worth it. My girlfriend and I just broke up, and even though it’s been a long time coming, there’s a great fear inside me of being alone again. But I have to look forward, know that I’m now free to meet new, better women, who will erase that loneliness again.

Okay, so you have a job now. It’s not the end of the road. It’s not a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. Your work becomes your life only if you allow it to. Otherwise, it’s simply a way to fund your pursuit of the things you want to do in life. So you write about wheelchairs all day. Write the best goddamn articles about wheelchairs that you can put to keyboard, so that when you clock out in the evening you can go home and use your well-exercised skills to pump out a bestseller. If you have something to work towards, your job is no longer Dante’s Inferno, but the slowly ascending path through Purgatory on your way to Paradise.

does it for me almost every time.

to create joy out of nothing, to create peak experiences from nothing - without having to take a vacation from your home which you named depression itself.

I see your point and I understand where you’re getting at. I don’t spend every moment wishing that things were better, because obviously that doesn’t help (though admittedly I do fall into that trap every now and then). I’m very well aware of where I am right now and I don’t like it, which is why I feel like I’m stuck. To create joy out of nothing is something that’s a whole lot easier said than done. It’s the struggle I go through everyday and more often than not, I fail at that. I’m not sure why I keep on trying. Maybe because I’m hoping that with enough effort, things will be better? But hope is such an overrated thing.

Here’s a thought: even without saying it explicitly, you and all who’ve commented so far have asked the question to you and to themselves, “how will my life turn out?”

Here’s the answer:

THIS IS IT, AND YOU’RE THE ONE.

This is exactly how your life turned out. The conversation for hope, that is “some day, may be, but not right now, my life will turn our” is an insidious trap that prevents you from being present.

To what? your life, as it is.

I’m not going to offer any consolation or make value judgments. But as long as you indulge conversations that describe the present and yet refuse to accept it, your life is not lived with power, let alone grace or joy.

Under a direct comparison, my life is not much different from yours or anyone’s - so I don’t claim any moral high ground to advise you. Just sharing this possibility: to create joy out of nothing, to create peak experiences from nothing - without having to take a vacation from your home which you named depression itself.

It’s a joy to write this, such freedom. And for this, I thank you for your blog.

Rarely do great writers invent a fantastic Bizzaro World with no connection to daily life. Rather, they find art in the struggles of ordinary people. A novel could erupt from the story of two bright young women — your story — contemplating life and exhaling pretty plumes of smoke somewhere in a tropical Eastern city — an ordinary scene to you but so fantastic to some snowbound Canadian or some starry-eyed kid from the [housing] projects of Chicago.

Years later, when circumstances have changed, even passed into history, the ordinary details of a day and age start to look extraordinary.

Keep collecting details but don’t become a slave to them when you write.

But you’re right. One day at a time. I’ll get to where I want to and you will too. I look forward to reading your novel someday.