The one thing my parents were more right than they could have ever imagined about was the fact that I was not "emotionally ready" to go away to school at 16. (I sometimes wonder about that line of theirs, wonder if perhaps they realized, on some level, that I needed help, and just couldn't bring themselves to offer it.) But anyhow, four years later, it becomes more apparent to me every day how fragile I am, how unequipped I am for dealing with failure.

But then, many things in life you can never be ready for. Doctors go through years and years of training... but after all that time, when they have the first patient where THEY are fully in charge... it's a shock. No matter how much they know, no matter how prepared they are, they can't be ready. Being a parent, I think, is the same. You can prepare... you can read every book, you can practice caring for other kids... but there is something different about doing it for real.

Life itself is like that... with all the preparation in the world, you never really become ready for the hardest things in life until you are doing them. You become ready because you don't have another choice. And the tough thing is... sometimes that doesn't happen. Sometimes you're as prepared as you can be, but when the time comes you can't rise to meet the challenges life throws at you. You fall.

But even after knowing this, after experiencing so many times the failures, the crashes where you should have succeeded... you have to pretend that you don't remember that you have failed yourself before. You have to find some way to convince yourself that next time, life won't beat the crap out of you. Next time you'll be ready.

And that is what sucks so very much about this whole ******* thing. The depressed are not always less capable than other people. But they are so acutely aware of their own weaknesses that they are crippled by them.

In fact, it's been said that we see ourselves more clearly than others can, but that is no skill, no victory. Seeing things "clearly" comes at the price of the lack of a psychological immune system... the system that is supposed to cloud our memories of our failures, remind of us of our successes, and give us the will to keep going and to believe we can, even in the face of stacks of contradictory evidence.

sorry, I'm tired, I'm not even making sense to myself... please forgive my babble