Have you ever tried (I mean really tried) to picture yourself in a sequence of different happy situations? Happy for you, not necessarily for anyone else? Forgetting about getting there, just being transformed into a happy situation? As many different ones as you can think of?

If you do that, if you can get comfortable with the idea of being in a happy situation, if it starts to feel like something you can "own," something that can be a real part of you, then turning around and looking backwards for a bridge from where you are now (looking from this optimal, future state back towards the present) may make the building of that bridge easier than you find it now to build a road to the future.

Have you travelled much? Should you travel more? Sometimes just wrenching yourself out of familiar surroundings and putting yourself into very, very different places helps you loosen the rusty socket you're in right now. A tour of decrepit industry in Cleveland and/or Detroit? An investigation of Indian reservations in Arizona or New Mexico? Viet Namese fishing villages in Louisana? Labrador? Coal mines in Appalachia? Maybe you get the idea.

Volunteering with people very, very much worse off than you are? Veterans hospitals? With developmentally disabled people? With the most seriously mentally ill? A different perspective, at the very least.

You're stuck in a groove. Sometimes, for some of us, talking to T gets us out (don't ask me, I may be stuck there too). For others it isn't enough. The change of perspectives has to be more radical. There are literally a million ways to do that. I'm sure you can think up thousands on your own.

Getting out of your lifelong groove. Free. Free to remake yourself as you wish. As you think best. There is no law that insists you must remain as you are. No one outside yourself, even the ghosts of your parents or quasi-parents, can set down rules for you to follow. You really are free. You may not feel that way but it's so. The chains that bind you, as you yourself know all too well, are in your head. I apologize for reiterating that tired old hackneyed idea. Unfortunately, it's still as true as it ever was.

I wish you all the very best.