Already, I am feeling the pressure and tension from my decision to reject that whole “I hate my life” jazz. I have had to very deliberately and firmly suppress that very thought a number of times today, and right now I feel like I am only keeping it at arm’s length by a sheer act of will.

The boredom and frustration with what my life has to offer is palpable. It is like a great cloud of dark energy roiling around inside me, looking for an outlet.

But I am denying its usual outlet, namely taking it out on myself. That is really no outlet at all, of course, Venting emotion at yourself is futile because nothing is really released. It just gets move around. You cannot fix a closed system like that.

At some point, things have to actually leave the system, not just move around inside it.

Keeping the “I hate my life” thoughts down is tough, but doable. Trying to see my life in a positive light, well… that is going to take a long time.

Reversing one’s spin like that takes more than an act of will. It takes an act of belief, and we depressives are notoriously poor at believing in anything positive. We are afraid to, afraid of being crushed by disappointment, so we take cold and corrupting comfort in taking the least positive, and therefore least exposed to the possibility of disappointment, positions possible.

It makes us feel safe. After all, if you stay down in the muck, you can’t fall again. Right?

But you can’t truly live your life like that, crawling around on the ground like an infant, and then wonder why everything seems so big and imposing and your world seems filthy and disgusting and hard.

You have to stand up and face the world and risk falling again. And if you fall again, get up again. It is how we all learned to walk in the first place, and it is how we must go forward in life. Not for anyone else, but for ourselves, so that we can be happier and stronger and more alive.

So we can be how we want to be. How we dream to be.

And think about those long ago days of learning to walk on our own.

First step, pull yourself onto your feet. Where would we be if, after the first time we fell down, we had decided that the floor was just fine for us, and these urges to pull ourselves up were just irrational desires to do scary things that could only lead to pain?

And at first, pulling yourself up to your feet is enough. You look around at the world from this new perspective, and it feels good. It feels right.

But then, from this new perspective, you see something across the way from you, and you want to go to there. Something draws you towards this other thing, and at first, you might drop down and crawl there.

But that feels wrong. And so you take your first big steps… but most importantly, first you have to let go of what you are holding on to in order to stay up.

This is a vitally important step. It is, in a sense, an act of faith to let go, with both hands. You have to listen to the voice telling you to do so, even though standing up by holding on to something is all you have ever known.

If we were capable of rationality at such a tender age, you might think this irrational. Give up the tried and true, known method of clinging to things in order to follow some strange urge to let go and move toward some distant object? Without even CRAWLING? Madness.

Luckily, we are too young to know better, so we do it. We let go, maybe learning to stand first, but often learning to walk before it occurs to us that you can just stand still without falling over.

And you fell, over and over again, and cried, and got frustrated, and maybe even went back to crawling for a little while longer.

But you got up again, and tried again, and eventually, you reached that distant object, just toddled on over and grabbed onto it, and just like that, you had learned something amazing and new.

Because remember, the point of the exercise was not the goal, it was learning to walk.

And we all did it. Nobody reading these words failed that particular test. We all pulled ourselves up, we all faced the void between where we were and where we wanted to be, we all tried to close that gap and failed over and over again, often getting hurt in the process, and yet we all persevered and learning to toddle, and then to walk, and so on to running and skipping and jumping and all the rest.

And not because we knew we would succeed eventually. And not because we had faith in ourselves, either. We were not capable of either of those at the time.

You did it just because you had a desire so strong that it drove you to keep on trying to fulfill it no matter how many times you fell down.

Luckily, back then, you were too young to count them, anyhow.

So how come we were so smart back then, when so many of us forget that lesson in our adult years? To just keep trying till we learn the way?

Granted, there are times when the only thing to do is give up. We learned that we could not reach up and touch the Sun, no matter how high we stretched.

But still, I think a lot of us, as adults, have made the decision to stay on the floor instead of pulling ourselves up against by our own two hands, and learning to walk.

And if you can learn to walk, who knows?

Maybe you can even learn to fly.