In the classic heroic arc, the hero (in other words, us) has to go through a long, grueling ordeal with no end in sight, and they have to just persevere and never give up hope and all that good stuff.

And we, the reader, can go through this with them, because we have the privileged position of knowing that they make it, sooner or later. After all, this is heroic storytelling, and the hero always wins. So we know they will not die crossing that untamed wasteland or vast sea of sand.

They will make it. Otherwise, the story would end right there, and that would be stupid.

Well, lately, I have been feeling like I am going through my own desert, and unlike the hero of a story, I have no such guarantee of success. But like the hero, I really have no choice but to keep going, because if I stop, I will die.

Maybe not physically, but just as irrevocably.

Besides, like the hero of many a tale, I am at the mercy of forces outside my control now. I probably could not stop what is going on inside me now even if I wanted to, which I do not.

I have been saying that I will have to go through some bad times before I get to the good in order to recover. I have a huge emotional backlog to process, and well, you do not suppress the good emotions (hopefully), it is the bad stuff which has to be brought to the surface and felt fully before you can let it go and reclaim another part of yourself.

And that just plain is not going to be fun.

So that is my desert. Perhaps there is the occasional oasis, where I dislodge and dispose of yet another enormous layer of emotional detritus and get to momentarily bask in the feeling of being lighter and stronger and more whole, but then it is back to the path only I can walk, and only walk alone.

So that, at least, would put my recent struggles with feeling frustrated and angry and unhappy into some kind of meaningful and productive context.

I have been having periods where I just do not feel like getting out of bed, because seriously, to do what? Play Facebook games all day? Yay.

But eventually, you get bored of being in bed, too, and you have to get up and face the day, no matter how you feel about the prospect.

In some ways, this is actually a more typically depressive mood. A lot of people report not feeling like getting out of bed when they are depressed. One might mistake this, then, for the opposite of progress.

But I think it does count as progress. I have brought my depression to the surface and I am struggling with it directly now, instead of being undermined by it constantly but never looking it in the eye and asking it what it’s fucking problem is like I am doing now.

And the going might well get still rougher from here on. There is no guarantee that the fight will be brief, or pleasant, or easy, or fun, or of a predictable length or cost.

But I know I will win, because I will never stop fighting, and I give no ground. Victory is inevitable. Especially if I continue with therapy, which I have every intention of doing.

That big ol’ bulldozer will continue pushing the garbage out of my subconscious mind and into the conscious, and making me deal with it, and I will deal with what needs to be dealt with and consign the rest to the void.

Sometimes, the sadness is profound. It is a lot like mourning, or at least, how I imagine mourning to feel. A feeling of sadness, and loss. A feeling like you are reaching out for something, trying to get it back, when you know very well that it is gone forever.

A feeling that part of you has died, and you have to let it go, but you can only let it go a little at a time, like grains of sand flowing through your fingers.

What am I mourning? Well it sounds maudlin and cliched, but I suppose I am mourning my childhood, or rather, the one I never got to have because of all that happened to me.

I am still stuck on that idea of it never being too late to have a happy childhood. I really want that to be true, but I will be damned if I have any idea how the hell that works. I will ask my therapist about it on Thursday, I suppose. Maybe he has some idea.

I have a sinking feeling that it only applies to middle class middle aged people who are having a mid-life crisis and have the resources to go do all the things they never got to do as kids, and buy all the things they wanted as kids, and all that jazz.

That is not much use to a dirt poor half-person like myself. Besides, I do not think of my childhood in terms of fun I never got to have, or the pony I asked for every year but never got.

I think of it in terms of profound loneliness and all the social and emotional development that I missed because I was such a misshapen misfit, brilliant in some ways and retarded in others.

But nobody thinks you have any problems as long as your grades are good. And, admittedly, I was not the easiest kid to deal with. But whatever.

Point is, at least I have some idea how to mourn for the childhood I did not get to have, and to some extend, for the child I never got to be.

But I have absolutely no idea how to fix things, to correct what went wrong in my childhood via positive action in my adult life.

Maybe I have to finish mourning first.