In my solitude I have had many occasion to be sad and regretful about many, many things. They can be decisions I've made, things I have done, opportunities lost, situations that have arisen or failed out arise with or without my personal agency involved. Obviously, I spend some time cataloging and processing the different ones in the hope of finding some peace, closure or resolution to them, at least the ones I can effect.

A new loss that I have discovered is the domestic life that I had. I live in a house and had a yard to tend. I had/have a dog to walk, now I have visitation. The life I had was no different in description from the life of the average married man, after the kids have grown and left and the nest contains only the couple themselves. Losing this life actually started and was a cause of our eventual dissolution. My wife started buying items for the house along the lines of a new tub insert, new hardware for the bathroom, paint and a bunch of junk that would replace the other junk, but which required installation. So instead of enjoying the peace of it, my home environment became a construction zone. Little by little, all tranquility and the environment in which rejuvenation after a long days work could take place was destroyed. This is what I started coming home to, and facing on every weekend. Or the cost of not facing it, which was just as bad.

But I miss that life of coming home to a house and routine. I needed that to keep me happy and give me strength to do what needs to be done in life. I know this seems like a simple observation of the obvious, but divorcing and the myriad of emotional fibers that left dangling in the aftermath made it difficult to distinguish. For a while I confused this with maybe missing my X, or married life, but getting a divorce was a very good decision and I have no regrets and I have a strong clarity about that. I continue to unwind the knots of my life.

Dependence.

I guess I am at a crossroads in my life. It is time to choose. The choices are mutally exclusive, they all lead to different and permanent life paths, no refunds. The nub of it is staying in a town I don't really find comfortable with a great job, or going somewhere I think I would like and starting over. The other choice is to do nothing and by default just stay where I am at.

So maybe I'm not depressed but just experiencing life as it is. The whole idea underlying the concept of depression is that it is a suboptimal state, but maybe it's not. Maybe it is baseline and feeling happy and fulfilled is an artificial state. This is the typical kind of thinking that captures and grabs my imagination.

At this point in my life it doesn't help to be reflecting on this type of question, as I need to make friends and I want to be in a relationship. Which just makes me question how healthy it all is to pursue needs and fulfillments that resist the basic facts or our existence, i.e., it is depressing and tragic. Tragic in the sense that we are doomed to die, there is no guarantee of happiness or even the absence of suffering. In fact suffering seems ubiquitous. We are in a continual state of suffering, and we spend our lives avoiding that and convincing ourselves otherwise. Or we do what the Buddha did and transcend it. I do think that is possible.

One can look around and observe the different skill level of people as to their ability to escape the tragic reality of life and be happy. Once you accept that the baseline is sad, that our factual existence is essentially tragic, the range of human psychological adaptation makes sense, or more sense. I am not wallowing in this very depressing line of thinking because I am masochistic, I just believe that happiness, or my happiness is possible while embracing the basic facts of human existence. That in the face of knowing this I can still build a happiness and that it will be effective. Which points to another aspect, happiness is a program, a strategy, and has some themes and rationales necessary to it's logic. For example, the logic behind my proposed program is that stuff can make me happy and will be effective, successful in keeping me happy or sustaining happiness, by taking the basic facts always into account. Also I think or hope that working out all of the ramifications of this fact of a tragic and bleak human existence, will somehow enable my happiness project to have a strong foundation.

This puts me in opposition to all the helpful advice one can expect to get when they are depressed or melancholic.

Definitely have been in a depressed mood. It really seems like it is the medication so I'm tapering off. My deep thought of the day is that most of my problems are the result of me thinking that I have a problem.

Less anxiety today to begin with. Another task of mine would seem to be accepting things as they are for the sake of personal well being. That makes for a interesting juxtaposition of making an effort to seek happiness which presupposes that things could be better, and not doing that to relieve the stress of the struggle. I think we all make an economic calculation of the cost and likelihood of success versus just not paying the price and making do with what is. I am not opposed to the idea that good things happen, but I don't feel lucky yet.

I wake up in a state of apprehension about the day ahead.

This is becoming the routine. As the day progresses, distractions help my mood to brighten. I take a small downturn around 5-7pm. If I have an activity during this period I am able to get through it well enough. In general though, today worked out well, I would give it a 7 on a scale of 1-10. Yesterday was a 6.

I realized today that one factor of what I am dealing with in terms of post divorce baggage, is that my X was negativistic. She is doing better now, but during the bulk of the marriage there was a patter of pessimism and low grade chronic negative ambiance emitting from her. Part personality, but also related to chronic medical conditions. Nevertheless, I catch myself meandering into negative territory, like in a conversation I notice that if I start feeling anxious I will bring up more negatively constructed sentences and topics, and communicate negativity in non-verbal channels of communication and expression also. I think it comes across that I am depressed or unhappy or faking it, but it's a subtle thing. I might as well be whining.

So what I am thinking is that I have internalized some of that negativism and it sometimes feels like I am channeling my X. I have started observing this and I am trying to convey more positivity and have a consistency between my outer expression and inner states. I am carefully managing my thoughts so I don't ruminate uselessly about downer topics, or engage in self-defeating thought patterns. I am trying to keep it real and be honest with myself.