today...and this week...has been especially hard. i feel the despair and hopelessness about my life, or life in general. i feel a lack of hope for love and a relationship. i wonder how much this despair runs in my family. my brothers suicide seemed very tied to it. my younger brother suffers from it, too.

i feel a serious lack of the old abitions i once had, the old hopes even. is this transient, or a new , worse pattern for me since the loss of my dad and oldest brother. my brother was a suicide. my father a heartattack. sometimes my heart feels funny and i get scared, tho things have checked out physiologically.

my brother was a doctor. my father a social work clinician. i once wanted to go into therapy training. and i once wanted to write creatively. having accomplished only part way in both disciplines i feel at times like these a failure. and yet should i feel a success having worked so hard on my own issues in therapy that i didnt follow my brothers road? i have succeeded there, but i dont feel a success.

i have succeedeed in being a friend to others, but that doesnt sustain me today. i have succeeded in keeping my own demons from destroying me, but yet i feel such despair today and loneliness.

why is life so hard? are we creatures doomed to self destruction? every beautiful thing we create seems destined to be torn down or perverted into something cheesy or cheap or empty. and every amazing person...eg, gandhi, martin luther king, bobby kennedy...who seems on the brink of stimulating a real difference...is cut down and destroyed...almost as if by their nature they attract the most desperately aggrieved and vicious, the worst in us.

i guess losing hope is part of life, and one must come to accept this pain, see it as an emotional experience we must embrace, lest our rigid resistance to it turn us dangerously cynical, bitter, vindictive, or just depressed...or anxious, like my ex brother...ourselves.

so hard sometimes to hold onto that very thin thread of truth...that its an emotional experience we must pass through, like a storm, not to be equated with who we are...

makes me think of what a wise person once said...that we become desperate, sometimes dangerously so, where we cannot bear to feel our despair.

i feel that today...the line between them. and it scares me. hopeully scares me into just letting go more, even tho i am all alone and even scared to call a friend i fear wont be able to just be there for me and not judge me...

im so sad, and the sadness takes on a universal quality when i let go and feel some of it. and its overwhelming... so overwhelming it feels like dying a lot of deaths.

sorry if im sounding depressing as hell. but im not sorry, too. life is what it is, and it seems to me so much of my own misery, like those i read of others here, is in the fear and shame and holding back.

im gonna try so hard to not hold back. to let go. i know im not really alone. the more i read here, the more i know that...at least where we dont fight it so much. cause then we know how much we are bonded in suffering in this life, and it should bond us more and more. cause the more i let myself feel all of this, the less i feel alone. like magic.

like a magic thats so often so hard to get to, tho its right in front of us all the time. just let go and you will come back to life, a wise mentor once used to say. its just life, she said.

yeah. this crazy life. one day at a time. giving...in...to get.

but on days like this its all i can do to give in and cry. it feels like im gonna die.

maybe we sort of do. many times in this life. and maybe life is about being less afraid of all these little deaths the older we get. is that maturity, in a manner of speaking?

if so, heres to being a little mature today. i feel like such a desperate child. i want something and i cant let go into the truth of not having. but so much of life is filled with that...with not having

so that the moments we have are worth living for.

...g