I’m listening to Billie Holiday and the rain coming down outside. If I didn’t feel like shedding a few tears before, I do now.

I guess I always know I’m not doing well when I start saying things like “my mother was right”, but that’s how I feel today. It’s too bad I don’t drink, I feel like in a movie this is the point where I pour myself a glass of something, sit on my sofa, and mope. I guess I can’t even mope right.

I know that failure is a part of life, that if you ever want to succeed you need to fail about a thousand times first. If you don’t go through this failure the odds of achieving anything worth achieving fall down to nothing.  But I keep failing at things that should be simpler than this. I figure out how to do it better, I figure out how to fix my problems, and then things still don’t work. I feel defective. Everyone else I see seems to have things figured out better than I do.  I know that’s dumb, I know it’s really dumb to look at everyone else because for the most part, I don’t want what they have, anyhow. But still….they wanted things, so they went out and got them. They were somehow adequate when it came to fulfilling their goals, whereas I am not.

And I’m disgusted by the pity party in my head.

Every time I get going on a new project, trying to defy my pattern of failure, I end up seeing the last hour of my father’s life play through my head, or thinking about something I’m still pissed about from my crappy childhood, and end up with my head cradled in my hands trying to shake the ideas out of my head.

My optimism is pretty well being beaten down. My optimism has brought me through an eating disorder, through a time when I wanted to die, out of my parents house. My optimism has gotten me through everything. I keep trying to remind myself that this isn’t bad as all the other things I’ve been through, but it doesn’t feel that way. I guess that’s largely because I don’t feel like the same person anymore. I’m a new person, and this new person doesn’t really know what to do about anything at all.