What does it really mean to be done? I’ve got 17 days of formal education left. I’m trying to be as optimistic as I’ve ever been about the future, but I’m just not an optimistic type of guy. I don’t know. I’m more of a giddy cynic. A hopeful pessimist. The mantra of my profession seems to be “Hope for the best, but expect the worst.”

I can’t be too Eeyore-like about it, though. I mean, I know for a concrete fact that there are a lot of people who are far more miserable than I am. And I’m not even talking about people in places like Afghanistan and Burma. All I have to remember is that I don’t have metastatic cancer, I have lungs that actually work, I’m not short of breath all the time, I don’t have a breathing tube down my throat, and I have all my limbs. (Just to reference a few conditions I’ve run across of at work, of people who are clearly in worse shape than I am.)

But this whole despair thing can really get a guy down. As a morbid exercise, I decided to rank the ways I’m probably going to die. The way it currently stands is as follows:

1. suicide
2. high-speed motor vehicle accident
3. coronary artery disease/acute myocardial infarction
4. cerebrovascular disease/stroke

Seriously, though? I’m starting to worry about #1 a lot. Thankfully, the rapidly increasing price of gas is actually making the likelihood of #2 decrease. I can minimize #2 by minimizing the time I spend on the road. I mean, sure, I could always get hit by a bus, but I could also get hit by a hurtling meteorite, too. Life is uncertain, you know?

#3 and #4 are also minimizeable. If I actually ate right and exercised, I would probably survive at least 35-40 more years. But as I continue my sedentary lifestyle and refuse to do anything about it, #3 and #4 are going at it head-on, and are neck-and-neck.

But #1. I’ve got no way of knowing. Most days I’m OK. While certain things can be arduous, most days are purpose-filled and even possibly inspiring.

But then there are moments where I’m gripped with heavy, aching dread, and my mind is filled with the horror of years upon years of vapid, vacuous living, and the thought of living through them all is so onerous that suicide seems to be the only rational course of action.

Right now, I’ve got no incentive to make something better of myself. I’m not exactly sure what I’m waiting for. I’m starting to doubt if there might actually be something that would be able to stick its foot in my ass and make me get going. I like to wax poetic that if I found love, then there might be a reason. But that’s a pie-in-the-sky. Where I’m at right now, I’m pretty damn unloveable. While a lot of women are totally into “bad boy” personas, I really just suck in an irredeemable fashion. Nothing hot or sexy about it.

Certainly, a lot of this is rooted in some serious self-confidence issues. You would think that, by mere dint of getting to where I’ve gotten, I’d have some sort of modicum of self-pride. At least that’s how I imagine a rational person would behave.

But there’s been nothing. For some reason, despite the realization that life really hasn’t been all that horrible, I can’t seem to find a comforting memory that is unequivocally positive. Every triumph in my life seems to be interspersed with some sort of awful sacrifice. Every victory seems pyrrhic. Every moment of joy is tempered with sorrow.

See, what we have here is what psychiatrists like to call a “cognitive error.” The problem with depressed people is that they always tend to hang on to the very ideas that are driving them down their path of self-destruction.

If I could just realize—and actually accept—that my life doesn’t really suck at all, and that there have been some good times in my life that haven’t been tainted by the bad, then I might actually get somewhere.

I’ve read books. I’ve talked to mental health professionals. I’ve studied this disease from end-to-end, and while I understand the techniques, and know all the data, intellectually speaking, I just don’t feel it. I just can’t seem to navigate my way to self-healing, which is ultimately the thing that must happen. I can visit shrinks all I want, every day even, for the rest of my life. But I realize that they can only point me in the right direction. I’m the one who actually has to get there.

Until then, #1 is still going to be there. I’ve managed to stay ahead of the (generally favorable) odds so far. But that bullet is still in one of those chambers, and until I actually stop pulling that trigger all the time, one of these days I may just strike true, causing needless pain and sorrow to the few people who might actually care.

Ever since I’ve been caught up in my crisis of faith (fast approaching seven years now! Woot!) I’ve kind of abandoned spirituality. I mean, I feel like I’ve come to grips with the possibility that a hyperintelligent, disembodied entity (whom, for convenience, we could call God) may very well be trying extremely subtly to drive human history, but that’s as far as I’ve made it.

But it occurred to me that moments like these are exactly what prayer is for. Which is a complex topic that will probably have to wait for another post. (But for all you immature so-called Christians out there who use prayer to wish for material things, and to wish God’s violent intervention against your enemies, you can all suck ass and choke on dingleberries for all I care.)