You

Inevitably, you will go somewhere, some informal gathering of friends, perhaps a party of some sort. You will discover that you are surrounded by people your age who all seem to be doing pretty well in life: active, successful, progressing in their art (whatever that word may be construed to mean), and content in a non-complacent way. And it will slowly make you feel like crap. Particularly the morning after.

You look squarely at your day ahead, at your day-job-slash-career (the thing you do for money), your achievements (or things you hope to achieve within a certain time period) and you have realizations of which many are negative, self-critical, sometimes despairing.

You know the colder months do not treat you well. You know that you suffer silently from something which begins with a “d” and rhymes with “repression”, and that there’s sweet-dick you can do about it short of spinning the midway crown-and-anchor wheel of pharmaceuticals. You also know that there is no cure, that winter has only begun, and that your public transit reading material is a collection of essays written by someone who suffered similarly and recently committed suicide.

It is one of those moments when the warmest of jazz songs on the radio does not warm you, that despite the windows in your apartment the January daylight is too cold. It is one of those moments where you look outward for signs of optimism, but in doing so you also make yourself susceptible, where both good and bad pass freely through your unarmed perimeter. That, given your disposition, you see more bad than good (or even worse, emptiness; after all, even “bad” is a symptom of humanity). You know the good is there, but for some reason it is not as visible or vibrant as “good” should be.

You find solace in writing about it in second-person (a format you’ve been wanting to try) and by an unfinished roll of film in your camera and the possibility that there are things outside that could be captured as means to portray these unanswered questions. And that a long walk will do you good.