The feeling that even your struggle is artificial and meaningless. Your problems can only be conceived in the context of your own life. Of course you think they mean something - oftentimes these struggles seem to be the driver of all your behavior. But do they really? Are they not just a production of your restless mind which conjures struggle where it needn't exist?

Could life not be more than an endless toil? Or is that the ultimate and dismal truth of the human condition? You try and desperately try, over and over, relentlessly, or you give up and curl into a ball. Sometimes, the rare moment of bliss when your head breaches the surface for a few seconds, and then you are back below in the darkness and confusion. Alone and scared. But you glimpsed the sky. You know it exists and that motivates you to try to see it again. It's the only thing that drives you forward. Behind you are demons, they're following you closely and they desperately want to drag you down to the depths where you belong. The gaps between the moments you reach the surface become longer and longer and sometimes it starts to get to you. You become discouraged but you look at the alternative behind you and you know that it could be much worse. So you don't let them see the weakness in your face or disposition because they will happily exploit any chink in your armor.

You know this struggle is meaningless and unnecessary but you look around and see that everyone else is just struggling along the same way you are. Sometimes they just give up and sink to the bottom. That makes you afraid. The people around you seem to have it together, they seem to have it all figured out, but you sort of know intuitively that they're in the same boat whether they realize it or not.

Sometimes you think about giving up. But you always seem to find some modicum of respectability in the endless pursuit that you latch yourself onto so that you might continue telling yourself that you're doing the right thing - or at least, you aren't doing the wrong thing.

You used to have vision. It seems to you that it used to be much easier to justify your own existence to yourself. At 18 the world was before you. Even though you were always scared, the world seemed to be full of possibilities. You don't see that anymore and you're stunned at how you could ever have thought in this way. It seemed that you used to be able to imagine yourself as Sisyphus. That if you just did the right things day after day, it would all fall into place. Now it occurs to you - the flaw in that vision. You didn't imagine that doing the right things would become its own prison sentence.

And anyway, you haven't done the right things. You're a flawed and twisted and struggling and beautiful and confused creature whose first instinct is to cower in a corner, not attack the world and ask of it what you really want. The possibilities are all closed off. The niches are filled.

You are alone. You have no one but yourself to rely on. You're not important. You're extraneous.