Lately I have been having a pronouced despair. Much greater is it now than anyother time in my life. We all know the experience of despair. It is utterly common to the human condition, and the sin is not in feeling it, but in giving up in the face of it. There *is*, of course, a certain reward that comes to those who _do_ give in to despair, but it is a bitter peace, and it is characterized by the kind of eagerness for death that culminates in suicide. Acceptance of death, of course, is a fundamental spiritual milestone, but I do not believe at present that total negation of hope is the correct route thereunto. Despair overwhelms us, in the sense that we feel powerless or hopeless before it. That, indeed, is the essence of despair--the obliteration of hope beneath a crushing wave of guilt, sadness, and anxiety. These emotions are the triple threat of depression: The afflicted person is guilty about the past, sad about the present, and anxious about the future. All three temporal faculties--memory, perception, and imagination--are colored by darkness. I am finding that the greatest griefs are those we cause ourselves. .Sometimes when you look back on a situation, you realize it wasn't all you thought it was. A beautiful girl walked into your life. You fell in love. Or did you? Maybe it was only a childish infatuation, or maybe just a brief moment of vanity. Is love supposed to last throughout all time, or is it like trains changing at random stops. If I loved her, how could I have left her? If I felt that way then, how come I feel like I do now? I wondered if our relationship had consisted of passion, keeping us fully in the present, so that time became a series of mutually exclusive 'nows.' It is with our passions, as it is with fire and water, they are good servants but bad masters. I felt she removed the greatest blessing of our friendship, taking away from it her respectfulness. I made excuses for her actions, or blamed her for them. I tried to rembember that when dealing with people we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bustling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.It was precisely the right consideration, unfortunatley I was considering the wrong person. I have wasted a lot of time running after answers I could have caught by just standing still and looking at myself. There I find all the reasons "why", that I have been searching for. I am not now nor have I ever really cultivated the virtues one must to command respect. I am the person I always thought I have been unfairly treated as. I bring to the table a lack of goals or dreams. I am a stranger to ambition and purpose. I have learned I can see a lot by just looking. The broken man who returns my empty stare while standing in front of the mirrror has always known. It requires a great deal of faith for a man to be cured by his own placebos. I've stopped taking mine. I realize that things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them... there is nothing. One does what one is; one becomes what one does. This cannot be avoided. Thus I know now I will not ever feel love again. I try to forget how good it felt. However nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it. The irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired. I have one intimate confidant. My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known -- no wonder, then, that I return the love. Depression appears to have the effect of stopping a person in their tracks and forcing them to turn inwards and engage in a period of self reflection; it is a deeply introspective state. During this period, which can last anything from days to years, I find I must find a new way to interpret my thoughts and feelings and reassess the extent to which my appraisal of my reality is a valid one.