Since You Asked

Knowing what I know, how can I, or anyone, for that matter, truly change? How do I stop making the same old choices, drawing in the same old men, putting up with the same old crap?

Sincerely,

Ready for Change

Dear Ready for Change,

I only know one thing about this. When you have had enough then you will change.

Have you had enough? Have you truly had enough? Are you stumbling, blind and desperate? Are you lying on the sidewalk? Have you fallen to your knees and cried out to anyone who can hear that you cannot go on one minute more?

Then you will change.

Until then, you may acquire new skills and insights that alert you to your behavior. You may make better decisions. You may abort certain activities. You may begin to see the patterns in your life with greater clarity. You may become more cautious. You may get better at evaluating potential mates.

But you will not change in any fundamental way until you reach a breaking point. This breaking point may not be dramatic or even visible to others. It may be quiet, a moment  when something shifts inside. You may not even realize it at the time. But a transformation is not an adjustment. It is a shift.

Many desire deep, fundamental change, yet it is elusive. Certain life-changing experiences bring us to our core selves, or force us to make certain leaps — leaps of faith, leaps that take us out of the ordinary and expose us to a more authentic and searing experience of the self. But how does that happen? How can we make it happen?

I don’t think we can make it happen. But there are things that seem to predispose us to it.

Having a fatal flaw can be a blessing. Facing it may bring about the change you long for.

For me it was alcoholism.

That is all I know, personally. I have only experienced this once, when my alcoholism brought me to a condition in which I was willing to do the 12 steps. But people have adapted the 12 steps to other conditions. It seems reasonable that certain psychological conditions would produce the same hopelessness and despair that drive people to do the 12 steps.

Those of us who have found lasting help through the 12 steps can usually point to one defining moment. Such moments are usually preceded by years of difficulty and numerous attempts to change without experiencing any major disruptions in life or having to entertain foreign and sometimes empirically questionable notions. What happens in these moments is qualitatively different from the acquisition of new life skills or psychological insights. We had acquired life skills and understanding and insight but still could not stop doing what we were doing.

So I would suggest if you want such an experience that you entertain the notion that you might be one of those people for whom the 12 steps might work even though you do not seem to be an addict. I have heard people speak of being so demoralized by their behaviors that they “hit bottom” with codependence, sex, anger, etc.

It makes sense. It’s not my story, but it makes sense. Why should alcohol have a special place in the mechanics of human transformation? Why would the universal human experience of hitting bottom and reaching out for help and finding a new way of living be confined to addicts? The history of religion and consciousness shows otherwise.

The important point is that transformation is not acquisition; rather, it is loss. We do not pick up new tools for living first; we first abandon what has served us so far, and in that moment between abandoning what has brought us this far and stepping into a new vessel is a moment of profound terror and joy.

That moment of terror is what distinguishes transformation from mere adjustment.

Since you have are standing at a precipice, I suggest you look into the 12 steps as they have been applied to problems of relationship and family. Al-Anon is a group that started to help the family members of alcoholics but has now been found useful for a variety of human problems.

But the steps are just activities; the results can often seem miraculous but I continue to believe that change begins with some ineffable human shift, whether you call it raw desperation, ego deflation, a moment of clarity, incomprehensible demoralization, seeing the light … it doesn’t matter so much what we call it as long as we understand what we are talking about. So the problem remains: How are we brought to this point? How do we arrive at it? Can it be precipitated, like inducing birth?

Perhaps you will be brought to this point by continual meditation on your problem, or by continuing therapy, or by a sudden realization; perhaps it will come to you as nothing more than a passing thought that has lasting resonance. I urge you to begin with the 12 steps and see where that takes you; doing such activities, if nothing else, seems to keep us attuned and alert to the necessary moment, whenever it arrives, and it always arrives in its own time.

My problem is there hasn’t been a night that has gone by that I haven’t had a “nightmare” about this guy. And the new girl. And his parents, whom I adored. A recurring dream is that I move into a new place (which I did already) and I am so excited about it, and then I walk outside, and there they are, my next-door neighbors.

I have been on a couple of dates and met some really nice guys whom I really don’t think twice about.

I know I did the right thing, but I am so embarrassed and annoyed that my subconscious will not let it go. Any suggestions on what it might take to stop these dreams/nightmares?

My subconscious would really appreciate it.

Over It But Not Really Over It

Dear Over It But Not Really,

My subconscious had a conversation with your subconscious and found out that you’re still totally in love with this guy. Your subconscious is, anyway.

Your subconscious was telling my subconscious how attractive he was and what a good time you used to have until the conversation started to really irritate me and I had to break in and say some things to both of them.

“You’re all about you, aren’t you?!” I said to your subconscious. “Here this girl is trying to get over this guy and she’s asking me for help, but you just can’t get enough of him. You keep throwing him right back in her face. What’s wrong with you?”

Now, because my subconscious and your subconscious were speaking to each other in their own special language, I can’t transcribe exactly what your subconscious was saying. But here’s a rough approximation.

“You really loved him, didn’t you?” my subconscious said.  “You really loved him and she ditched him without consulting you. That’s it, isn’t it? You felt comfortable with him screwing up all the time, not being true, not being able to settle down, not telling the truth? How can you love a guy that much who treats her so badly? Aren’t you and she one and the same? Don’t you have any regard for her? You’re just out for a good time and nothing more?

“You don’t care? Really? You’re her subconscious and you don’t really care that much what happens to her? Oh, you don’t mean that you don’t care, but that you don’t take her fears seriously because they’re groundless ego fears? That she’s not really in danger even though she thinks she is? That she doesn’t really have a broken heart even though she’s crying for months? What are you talking about? [Your subconscious can be a little arrogant and obtuse -- like a lot of subconsciouses.] It’s just “ego fear”? Come on. Really?

“So riddle me this, Her Subconscious: Where were you when she was going through all this with this guy? You were right there? Why didn’t you tell her?

“What? You liked it when he wouldn’t behave? You liked the fact that he was out of control? That is crazy! That is perverse!

“Oh. Right. You’re the subconscious. You’re supposed to be crazy and perverse.”

After having this conversation with your subconscious, I understand you much better. Your subconscious loves the jester and the cowboy and the wanderer, who make for sketchy boyfriends but your subconscious doesn’t care. It’s not that your subconscious doesn’t care about you. In fact, you are all it cares about. But it considers many of your fears to be petty, society-based fears, not grounded in spiritual reality. See, your subconscious is coming from a perspective of pretty much timelessness, infinity, no death, that kind of thing. It’s not in a hurry, your subconscious. It’s got loads of time. It always has a parking space.  When it’s just parking, it’s into parking. If it’s making love, it’s just making love. It’s just interested in what’s happening before or afterward or in different locations. That’s meaningless to the subconscious: future, past, here, there — it’s all the same. Plus, when postage rates go up, it doesn’t have to adjust the meter, if you know what I mean. (That’s the most amazing thing of all, if you’re in a small business. But you don’t know what I’m talking about now, do you, because you’re not in a small business? Well, you should be. As a hedge against inflation and joblessness.)

Anyway, this explains why you are in such a tough spot.

So what can you do?

Well, I know one thing. You have to give your subconscious what it wants, or it will make life hell.

Think of your subconscious as if it were a child and you were the adult having to pay its way and drive it around.

It’s like, OK, if it were playing baseball, it would be the one guy out there who is just enjoying the sensation of playing and doesn’t care about the rules or the score; he loves the crack of the bat and the sliding into base; he loves the feel of the clay and the grass; he loves the uniform and being out in the sun and cheering when something happens.

That’s your unconscious, or inner child, or soul, or whatever. That’s the part of you that is alive and hungry.

Your subconscious misses him more than you do. It misses the sweets. It misses the chance to be on top of the world, in the moment, laughing in the bar, completely satisfied. It misses him, how he took care of things for you, how he made things right while he was making things wrong.

Your subconscious knew all along exactly what he was like and what he was doing and that was fine.

You have no secrets from your subconscious. I think that’s where people get the notion of “God” as somehow all-knowing; it’s our projection of our own unconscious.

Your subconscious is pure knowing. It sees and knows and shrugs. It shrugs, that is, as long as it is getting what it wants, for that’s the other part of it: Your subconscious is also pure longing. It doesn’t care about the rules he broke. It just wants him back. And it will keep serving him up in dreams until it gets what it wants, which is … whatever it wants … which it will tell you about in the cryptic and maddening language of dreams and coincidence.

So what are you going to do?

You have to own it, for one thing. You have to own your own desire. You have to say, out loud, here is my desire for that guy, and it is strong, and I do want him, I want the taste of him, I want the feel of him, I want to do the things we used to do, I miss feeling the way I felt after we did the things we did, and I miss knowing that he wanted me and was there, and all the things that happened while we were together.

Your hungers have led you into bliss but also torment. You are a Western person who takes it for granted that you are in charge and that there are rules, and that a lover can strike out if he violates the rules. What you are encountering, though, is the nature of desire and the subconscious, which does not care about rules and the violation of them but only cares about vision and passion and taste and touch and wanting.

Go easy on yourself is one suggestion. Admit that you are not in charge, that your desires are bigger than you. Observe that moving and changing jobs and changing bars did not eliminate the condition of desire. That is because desire does not inhere in conditions or locations. It is in you; it is your desire. It is yours. Own it.

Satisfy it.

We stayed in touch through the breakup process, which crushed him, and we tried to stay friends although it was awkward at times, to say the least. I stupidly thought that I could break apart from him but remain best friends. Everyone says that doesn’t work. He admitted he was wrong to have denied me a commitment. He told me he wanted kids now. He proposed to me, and swore he’d try everything to get me back. I held off, but stayed in touch.

I joined Match.com and went on a series of somewhat lame dates (but I tried not be so hard on them or myself — I hadn’t dated in 10 years!). My ex bought a larger, less flashy car because, he said, “It’ll be good for kids.”

I moved my life to another part of the city. He kept all the pictures of us up in the house.

I told all my girlfriends I was a strong, independent woman now on the prowl and that they should all fix me up. My ex quietly told only those closest to him.

I told him I didn’t see a future with him. He planned a trip for us to go to Napa, and I — needing a break from work and badly wanting to travel with my “old friend” — went.

We had a wonderful time: We ate, tasted wine, walked along the river, laughed, made love. Everything went smashingly well.

Now we secretly meet once or twice a week (when I’m not out on my Match.com dates!). We make dinner at our old house or my new one, and sleep together regularly. I’ve only told a few close friends, because I don’t want to seem like a flip-flopper. But those few close friends aren’t really shocked because they knew how close we were for so long.

This is not characteristic of me. I am known to be a hard-ass. I’m known to make decisions and stick to them. I don’t turn back. I’ve never even fathomed I would write a letter to an advice columnist. I’m the rock everyone usually goes to for advice.

But I’m flat-out still in love with him, although I’m very suspicious of his 180-degree turn in terms of kids and marriage. I don’t want to go back to him and end up playing the fool. On the other hand, I don’t want to lose the person I could live my life with and make a future with.

Is it just the excitement of the thing that’s getting to me, or is this one the real deal? I’m asking you: Can you think of a way I can test him or test myself to know the difference? Please advise.

Hardheaded in Love

Dear Hardheaded in Love,

You want to test him? You just did. He passed. The test is over.

Can you hear him talking? He bought a sedan. He kept all your old pictures up. He proposed.

He’s saying he’s ready. He’s saying he’s changed. He’s saying he doesn’t want to lose you. He’s saying come on, marry me, let’s have kids.

What more can he do?

He doesn’t want anybody else. He wants you. Maybe neither of you realized it but the whole episode sounds like a test.

Pencils down.

Get married. Quick.

Which brings me to my problem. My fiancé and I have been together for over six years and we just got engaged. I love him with every ounce of my being and our relationship is sincere and stable. I’m lucky to be with him, which is why I get so mad at myself when my anxiety creeps in and starts fights between us. For example, my fiancé and I have different privacy boundaries, which is to say that I have none and he has some. He likes some privacy when surfing the Web, checking email and sometimes talking/texting on the phone. To make things clear: He’s not being sneaky. If I ask him what’s up, who is he talking to, he tells me without hesitation, and I believe him. And I try not to ask!

It’s just that when I’m having a particularly anxious day (for reasons that I’m not always aware of, usually exhaustion), I key onto things like, “Oh, he just snapped the computer shut when I walked by” and cannot let it go. An “argument” ensues, in which I ask him why he just did that, he says it’s for no reason, that’s just how he is and he didn’t want to make me feel uncomfortable, and can’t I just trust that he’s telling me the truth? He knows his desire for privacy can sometimes make me uncomfortable, and he has made fair compromises to help put me at ease. He’s even asked if I want to look at his email, but I said no because I hate that idea. I am not the police, nor am I his mother. I trust him, so it’s not that, but rather, in the specific moment, I’m convinced that some colossal problem is here to rip our home apart, and I cry and cry, and then, after much talking, realize that there is no colossal thing here to rip our home apart, I’m just spiraling and he’s just being himself and everything is really OK.

I’ve seen a counselor about this. She suggested that when I start to panic I try shelving the anxiety for a moment and see the emotion underneath. I told her the emotion underneath is anxiety and asked her what that might mean. She suggested, given my childhood (it’s always the childhood … sigh), that I might be reacting to a fear of being left alone. Which makes sense to me.

My mother, who is also my friend, had her hands full with my trouble-prone younger brother from Day One of his birth, and there are many times when I was (unintentionally) ignored because my parents only had so much energy and that energy was best spent on keeping the crazy child from accidentally killing himself. In order to get some attention, I developed a great knack for overachieving. This has served me well in almost every regard. I’m working on the ways in which it hasn’t served me well, namely that I often overachieve to earn love I’d really like to (and can) have without working so hard.

I know I don’t have to work so hard. I know my life is good! I have wonderful, appropriately conditional love from my friends, amazing unconditional love from my mother and my father, and a healthy combination of both from my fiancé. It just makes me so anxious to think my anxiety could mess that last one up.

Thanks for any insights or advice you might have.

Anxiety Girl

Dear Anxiety Girl,

It sounds like your therapist was on to something.

If you are still seeing her, ask her to take you through this anxiety business again. Tell her you wish to spend some more time exploring what’s behind your anxiety. You were probably on the right track. It might take more than one try. It may take some camping out around the idea but eventually something will emerge.

I mean, I can relate to what you said to her — What’s underneath my anxiety? More anxiety!

Of course! That’s what it feels like. But if you keep looking, and enlist her help in focusing you on what precedes the anxiety, I predict that something will emerge; something will become clear to you; you will sense a connection and that will be a starting point to eliminating much of your anxiety.

The key point is that anxiety is not a feeling but something we do to ward off feelings. That’s how my therapist put it to me, anyway, if I understood him correctly: Anxiety is a strategy we use to avoid feeling things.

That’s why seeing what’s behind it can make it go away. Once you see what’s behind it, you no longer need it. You go, Oh, it’s just that! And let me reassure you, whatever feelings or memories there may be behind your anxiety, they can’t hurt you today. They’re just feelings and memories from the past that got misplaced in the present.

So that’s my general take on anxiety. I’m not saying you can fix it overnight. It’s a matter of retraining yourself, and learning, and like any learning it can take time. But you can definitely change.

As to your fiancé and his need for privacy, it could be that he just wants his privacy. It’s also possible that from time to time he is looking at things on his computer that he would be ashamed of, or that he would not want you to see. Also, if he has noticed your tendency to become anxious, he may be trying not to alarm you. Of course, as with our anxiety responses, this doesn’t ultimately really help. It just makes things more confusing.

Sometimes, if you are reading or looking at the computer, you are just in your world and you do not want to share. I can sympathize with your boyfriend. On the other hand, he may be looking at porn and be trying to hide it. Ask him. It would be good to know. Just raise the issue and see what he says. It might clear the air and save some guessing and confusion.

But your anxiety is the main thing. I think if you continue to work with your therapist you will discover what is happening in that moment before you become anxious. It may surprise you. In fact, if you’re doing it right, it will definitely surprise you.

It is Christmas and I am visiting my family and he has stayed back at home. He is not with us. I really don’t know why … something about my family ignoring us when we visit and he has a lot of work to do -– which could all be true, depending on how you look at it. We are flying back Christmas Day so we can be with him, but frankly I think this is nuts. Why didn’t he come with us? He said if we wanted to be with him for Christmas we would have to stay. I told him, “If we move to Europe next year I won’t be with my family for Christmas for a long time, maybe years. I need to go.” He said, “Then go.” So I did. Now I think, what the hell happened? Is he being crazy selfish? Or do I need to get over a childish need for us all to be together?

He works insane hours (six to seven days a week) in a very stressful environment and we don’t get a lot of quality time with him. When he is home he is an incredible dad and I actually really love him even though sometimes I can’t talk to him. How can I leave all my family and friends when he can’t take three days for Christmas to be with us? How will I survive the loneliness when we leave? I know his family, I love his family. It is not the same. I know his friends, I love his friends. It is not the same. Do I take the leap? We have a daughter. If things don’t work out between us, I can’t just pick up and leave to come back. I will be stuck there in beautiful, economically crushed Europe.

You can’t tell me what to do … but what should I be thinking about? How do I know if we have fallen off the cliff?

Map Reader

Dear Map Reader,

My guess is that your husband needs solitude and doesn’t know how to ask for it. That’s not your fault. You can’t read his mind. But it’s something the two of you may want to work on together. Why did he beg off on Christmas? He needed the solitude and rest but didn’t know how to say it or did not know that was what he needed.

Maybe he thinks he’s not entitled to solitude because he’s got to be such a good dad all the time. What would happen if just for a few weeks he wasn’t such a good dad? Would everything fall apart?

Send him off to the woods to do some hunting and fishing, or put him in an ice shack on a frozen lake, or put him in a spa. See if that helps.

You’re not moving in the wrong direction. You’re just moving.  You come up against obstacles. You come up against someone else’s nature. This is conflict. Conflict is natural. Rather than avoid it, the trick is to learn how to benefit from it. You benefit from conflict by recognizing that it’s a sign of your differing strengths, and learning to make more room for those strengths, and call less upon each other’s weaknesses. Sounds easier than it is, I know. It’s much easier to write it than to do it. I’m just saying, it’s not that you’re going in the wrong direction. You’re just encountering normal conflict, normal differences.

As far as the map analogy: I’d say the map you have is missing the town called “Solitude” and the town called “Recuperation” and a town called “Just Goofing Off” and a town called “Just My Friends, Not Yours” and “Just My Family, Not Yours.” Those are places worth stopping off at. You get stuff there. Maybe there’s a big ham on the table in one of the houses and it reminds you of when you used to feel just fine as a kid.

So each of you needs to put some places on that map where you can pull off the road and visit. Otherwise you’re just driving and driving and driving. You never see what you’re passing. No kidding, the kid wants to stop too.

To speak abstractly about the difficulties that arise in relationships, it is worth repeating a syllogism: He is not better than he is nor are you better than you are.

Some syllogisms are so true that we drift into thinking they are false — that things can somehow be as they are and also other than they are at the same time. They can’t.

Things can be as they are or they can be different. They cannot be both at the same moment.

Thus we’re stuck with what is right now.

Right now we can do things so later it will be different. That’s mainly what we’re about most days. We’re doing things now so later there will be a paycheck.

I know this sounds impossibly childish. It’s me imitating Gertrude Stein badly sort of. It’s a lot of things. It’s me under deadline just typing. It’s me with corny jazz on the headphones that keeps me writing. It’s the language machine turning of its own accord. It’s a lot of things.

So back to you and your husband. Forms of art — narrative and poetry, in particular — can crystallize where you are and what you are feeling right now and you don’t have to go to a museum. For big paintings, yes, but not for narrative art, which comes in small books and on Kindles and iPads. I suggest you seek out poetry and narrative fiction that crystallizes many of your emotions; I suggest living more in the complex constellation of what is actually going on.

Because nothing really bad is happening. You are just living with an actual person who is trying to get stuff by not talking about it.

During my campus years I matured to become quite social, especially as an activist, since I knew that at least campus was a more stable environment than I ever had at home. After graduation, my family coming from a very traditional Asian background with rather strict moral and religious values, arranged a marriage with the girl who would be my wife, and after months of bitter disagreements (I prefer not to use the word argue) I finally gave in.

From the start, I realized I would start in a loveless relationship and that I would have to learn to love her eventually, and I did learn to love her. Things started to take a slow but dark turn as my wife then started to control my life, especially when it came to women (she had serious abandonment issues) and rather than risk breaking up my marriage, with the obvious socio-cultural fallout it would definitely create, I chose to suck it up and simply let it slide. Eventually it progressed to the point that she became paranoid about every single person (male and female) that I knew, convinced I was having an affair with them. This got worse over the course of her pregnancy, and this to me was literally a living hell. For the sake of my child, I stood by like an idiot going along, but in the end after she gave birth, SHE said she couldn’t take it anymore and packed up and left with my son when I was overseas. I tried going after her and my son, but now she’s staying with her family and they refuse me access to my son. Any contact I have with them is simply via their lawyer. For weeks I couldn’t sleep or concentrate. I even managed to mess up an important project that got me fired from my job.

I just don’t seem to have the energy or focus to pursue anything now, and have distanced myself from everything. I started to drink rather heavily as well as smoke (I used to campaign against smoking companies). I realize that this could be classified as clinical depression but I just don’t see any solution.

My few remaining friends keep telling to get back out there, but every time I do it feels awkward, especially after having such a controlling person so central to my life for the past two years. I can’t seem to fight the urge to blame others for it all, especially my family, but in the end I know it was my fault. I can’t help but imagine what I’m putting my young son through, imagining what kind of life he’d have growing up without a father, since I had mine all along the way. In the end even though I feel an intense anger to them, I still feel I’ve let them down. I’m just clueless about what to do and that frustrates me even more since I’m usually a very driven and focused person.

As incoherent as it is, please help.

Clueless and HOMEless

Dear Clueless and HOMEless,

I have felt the same way you do. The exact things that have happened to you have not happened to me, not exactly, but I have felt the confusion and sense of betrayal, of having tried to do the right thing and have it come out badly, and the sense of not having a home.

So I speak to you with tears in my eyes. That is probably not the most disciplined way to write a column, and it may seem as though I am being melodramatic or currying sympathy but it is simply the truth, and I say not so much to arouse emotions in others but because, actually, I would like to bring tears into the written discourse of elite American society, so that over time it might become acceptable for a male writer to say from time to time that as he writes there are tears in his eyes — just as a statement of fact, not as a device. There are many traditional strictures under which a male writer writes, and for a long time I have followed most of them. I came across a line from Strunk and White the other day to the effect of, “Keep yourself out of it,” and I thought, my, how far I’ve drifted from the true and orthodox practice of “good journalistic writing”! (It’s complicated, trying to introduce things into language, as they quickly become their opposites. Yet it interests me, the notion of trying to normalize certain phenomena; it seems like on rare occasions it might be one small way to change how we talk with each other in writing. In more grandiose and hopeful moments one might think it could change how we men habitually process emotion and thus decrease the incidence of depression. But that’s pretty far-fetched. All I’m really saying is that I’ve been very emotional lately and your letter stirred me up again.)

It was the second anniversary of my father’s death last week, and I was not able to fully grieve his death at the time, so that is surely part of it. But your loss is your loss, and it’s real. There is loss and pain and these things are real and that is what crying is for. I hope you are crying from time to time because it makes you feel better afterwards. It lets you know what you are feeling. In fact, it seems that certain things can only be felt by crying; we may think we are feeling something but until our body begins its desperate heaving and sobbing we are more just observing it, knowing it is there, but not immersed in it. With the crying, one feels the emotion in one’s whole body; it passes through us, leaving us more alive. There is no doubt or confusion in the moment when one breaks down and cries; there is only the feeling, and the body suffused with that feeling, hot and awake to sadness and anger.

So when this feeling comes over you, do not be afraid to cry. You may cry for your boyhood, too, that lonely time of wandering, left to yourself, trying to become a good man against difficult odds, working to become a modern man in a family that practices ancient customs. It must have been hard for you growing up like that, especially since you seem to have a modern mind, the mind of an activist, the mind of a man who knows that society can change and people can change. So there must be a split between what you know intellectually and the demands of your family. To marry this girl in fact, therefore, must have required you to renounce a large part of yourself, the inquiring, socially aware, critical side. Yet you did it. You did it out of love and respect for your family. So you sacrificed a part of yourself and then this sacrifice was devalued, or annulled, by your wife’s decision to leave and take the baby.

Having no outlet or solution, you have turned this anger and frustration against yourself. That is likely one source of your depression; the way out will be to undo that act, by accepting that you are not the cause of this, but simply an actor with good intentions and a good heart, caught in a powerful system beyond your control. A good therapist can help you do that.

So do not blame yourself. You have done what you could. You have tried to do the right thing. Now your job is to take care of yourself, to get help for your clinical depression.

When we are depressed, we don’t think logically. Our thinking is clouded. So do not trust your thoughts on this. Trust medical science. Trust other people who are not depressed. They can see things a little more clearly than you can right now.

Now it is time to get help for your depression. You may find yourself putting it off or thinking of reasons not to do it. If so, I suggest taking certain simple, direct steps. Think of it this way: You have a new job. Your new job is to treat your depression. Call a hotline, find a psychiatrist or psychologist who can help you.

Take heart. There are a lot of us out here, and we do understand each other.