Sublime

Let’s say there’s an event and people around me get invited and I’m not invited. Some part of me will feel like a failure. How can you not? The real me knows that it’s just an event, but doubt enters my mind about why I’m not there. Is it because I’m not good enough?

What they don’t know is that all the seemingly unproductive acts that happen around writing—reading, daydreaming, decluttering, taking long walks, closing your eyes to fully appreciate the smell of rain on asphalt—are actually subtle and crucial activities that make writing possible.

Those experiments seemed to last forever: would I be this kind of person, or that? Live this way? Or that? Each friendship felt at the time like the one true one, the entry into the life I was meant to live. Each time I failed to understand the lives of my friends and their families. Nor did I grasp my effect (pernicious, for the most part) on

Perhaps even write my masterpiece. Or at the very least, Think Great Thoughts, Dream Big Dreams like full worlds you could wander. I did none of these things here. What I did here was seethe about petty things. Count the moth deaths. Think of money.

If you are living in the belief that success will cure your pain, when the treatment comes and doesn’t work, it can lead to hopelessness. A depression can accompany the realization that what you’ve spent most of your life chasing hasn’t fixed your insecurities and vulnerabilities. More likely, with the stakes and consequences now higher, it has