I’ve always believed that despair is not synonymous with the absence of hope. But it now just occurs to me that despair is actually when you begin to believe that having no hope would be preferable to the slim fragile sliver of hope that you’re clinging to, even as it wounds you with its seeming impossibility, like a piece of shrapnel inching its way slowly through the flesh of your heart with every beat, as your life’s blood seeps away drop by drop while you pine away for something you can’t figure out how to achieve, no matter how many nights you’ve spent lying awake in the darkness, your gut paralyzed, silent, and still, acid gnawing and rasping at your entrails.

Or, to quote the anti-Semitic French physician and author Louis-Ferdinand Céline: “Even masturbation, at times like that, provides neither comfort nor entertainment. Then you’re really in despair.”