O Frabjious Day!

Sometimes life sucks. This isn’t news. Your life has sucked occasionally, and I’m sorry about that.

There are different kinds of suckage. There’s the generally shitty day. It’s the kind of thing that produces platitudes like “door opening” and “silver lining”. We’ve all had those and I certainly hope your today isn’t one of them.

The thing about a shitty day is that it ends, and you deal with it. Whether you want to or not. You clean up and you cope.

Not so with the long-term decline. It doesn’t matter if it takes weeks, months or years.

The decline is insidious. You can reach a point where if things were only as bad as a few weeks ago that would be great. The decline feels like the air has turned into doom. The decline is a rusty suit of corroded mental armor that lets every attack through.

Of all the ways that life can suck, right now I think that the decline is the worst.

I had a decline going on around me. (I wasn’t depressed, this was external.)

Then something good happened.

In the midst of a decline you forget that’s even possible. But it is. It did.

And you know what? The decline went away.

That’s like Newton’s apple falling up. It's like finding out that Cheetos are rich in antioxidants, or that you persuaded somebody not to vote stupidly. It just doesn’t happen. But it did. I’m knocking wood things stay this way.

At least I finally understand that boring old story about Pandora, because now I know what hope feels like. It feels fairy-tale-ending good.