Yup. I did another comedy re-dub of a foreign language film.

It turned out okay.

It was supposed to be longer than that, but the video editing program I prefer, Ulead Video Studio, was crapping out at 86 percent rendered every time I tried to render it today and I finally just gave up.

You are really only missing about thirty seconds of gags. The rest was credits. So it’s no big deal really. But it pisses me off, because every time I tried to render the vid, it took around ten minutes to get to the point where it was going to crash, and so I spent around 45 minutes trying to get the goddamned thing to work before giving up the ghost.

Admittedly, the original credits were much funnier. Oh well, c’est la vie. It’s very important in life to be able to just give up on the current thing and move on to the next.

The first part is easy. Giving up is super easy. I’m excellent at it. But moving on to the next thing is the hard part. Giving up on the current thing without losing all hope and motivation, that’s the tricky bit. Giving up but keeping going.

And “going on to the next thing” can mean whatever it needs to mean. Trying the same thing again, trying something similar but not the same, trying something completely different, trying the next thing on your list, trying the next thing that pops into your head and seems like a good idea, or at least fun…it can be any or all of those, or something completely different.

The key thing is just to keep on trying. To give up because the first thing you tried did not work out is to make an extremely large generalization (this will never work) based on a single data point (it did not work one time), and that is just plain madness.

You have to keep plugging away, and do it with all your heart, as opposed to doing it while mentally counting down the times you have to try again before you are allowed to give up. If you go into something with that attitude (I can’t wait to stop), then you will not invest more than the minimum effort and focus on it, and hence doom yourself to the failure you were rooting for all along.

And then you can pat yourself on the back for being right all along, and glory in your self-defeat.

That is the sort of thing that prompts me to ask “Would you rather be right, or happy?”. What if your happiness lies on the other side of realizing that you have been wrong to feel so bad for so long? That is was totally unnecessary because with just a small adjustment in your attitude towards life?

Would you have the courage to make that realization, or would you decide that you would rather be miserable for the rest of your life if the alternative requires such a blow to your ego?

Another way of putting it : would you rather feel smart and miserable, or stupid and happy? After all, the realization that you have been stupid should not be such a big deal. You already have low self-esteem, so accepting that you have been stupid about one more thing shouldn’t be a big deal, right?

Oh, but this is different. That chilly pride you take in constantly proving to yourself and the world that you were right about the world sucking and you sucking and life being nothing but misery is the only bit of pride that you absolutely will not abandon.

I mean, sure, your life is constant suffering, but that’s better than having to admit that some person who told you something about having a better attitude that one time was actually right!

It’s like they are trying to take your pain away, those bastards.

But shouldn’t you want someone to take your pain away? Shouldn’t you be ready to hand that pain off to the first person who will have it like it’s a baby with a full diaper?

After all, if you are not willing to part with it, then you are choosing to stay miserable and why would someone do a thing like that?

Seriously. Ask yourself that. Why do I cling so hard to this pain, this thing that I keep saying I would do anything to erase?

It is not necessarily as illogical as it seems. The pain you carry demands a voice. All emotions, even traumatic ones, are information. Something inside you is crying out and the depression and suffering is the voice it uses.

It does not good to try to silence it. The only way to rid yourself of it is to find a way to express all that pain and rage and trauma, and then, its voice heard, it will fade away.

But first, you will have to face yourself, and people do many crazy things trying to avoid doing just that. I spend decades avoiding looking at myself in the mirror because it would just unleashed a massive torrent of self-loathing if I did.

I literally could not face myself. I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror.

But if you want out of your pain bad enough, you will focus your rage on the depression first and smash the cage you have been using to constrain yourself, stand up tall and proud, work the kinks out of your muscles, and breathe deeply of the air of freedom.

Of course, you don’t have to do it. You could just keep waiting for someone to rescue you, or keep waiting for a way out that involves no risk, sacrifice, fear, or pain to come along.

After all, that’s been working well for you so far, right? If it’s not broken, don’t fix it!

But you are broken, or so you say.

And what kind of broken does not want to be fixed?

The kind that is happy where it is.

So you must be happy…. right?