N is for Neville

I have a simple explanation for my depression: frustration. All forms of it: sexual, intellectual, interpersonal...I suck at most of all of the above in the sense that while I know how to deal with them when they show up, I never learnt how to turn them into sustainable sources of happiness. Essentially, I've been incapable of turning any of the above fleeting connections into meaningful ones.

To this point, my cure for depression has been to push myself to work harder to achieve the superficial satisfaction I've often mistaken for true happiness. To get to the point where I can get these superficial joys the instant I crave them..a kind of thrill-on-demand.

Which might be the very definition of a thankless task.

I'm cursed with the gift of getting every single thing I wish for. It takes time, but I usually end up getting it: I wanted money, I got it. I wanted to live abroad, I got that. I wanted to know a vast number of women on a very intimate level, check. I wanted

It's God's idea of a practical joke that by giving me what I believe I want and yet removing the endless delights it promised to deliver (or maybe it was never there to begin with), I find myself no better off than I was before.

Except with one more thing stricken from my list, because it failed to make me happy. That list is rapidly dwindling down to nothing.

I think happiness is doing what you know you like with people you know you adore, satisfied in the knowledge that what you don't have truly lacks the capacity to give you any real satisfaction.