Coffee and Conversation: A Tough Day and How I Got Through It

A rather difficult day for me today. Work went slowly and I was rather at loose ends as a result.

Living alone as I do is no picnic, sometimes. Sure, one has the freedom to come and go as one pleases, but sometimes I find myself wondering if anyone knows whether I am alive, or even cares that I am. This is of course an exaggeration, but you get the point.

I guess I have been suffering from the classic symptoms of depression, brought on by too much time on my hands. So I settled for doing a little shopping and sitting outside my apartment building for a while. (I am a newcomer to this area and I thought this might be a good way to meet my neighbors. But so far this strategy has not led to the appearance of anyone new in my life.) I was a little discouraged by the sign prominently affixed to the building that stated in bold letters "NO LOITERING" but I decided to risk being arrested by the loitering police and sat outside anyway.

Things went from bad to worse. Perusing my fairly extensive library I could settle on nothing that I really felt like reading. Television was no better.

I tried to get in touch with people I know, hoping that perhaps there was someone to whom I could lament my sad, pathetic life. But there was no help there, either. So after aimlessly roaming around the apartment for a time, I decided to put the coffee on in the hopes of achieving an artificially-created high -- and one of the few socially acceptable ones available to law-abiding people on a limited budget. I then proceeded to surf the web, typing in inspiring things like: "I wish I were dead" and "I feel so very alone."

Gradually, my self pity turned into a sort of stubborn defiance. As I drank my coffee, I turned to the one of the few things that seems to help in times like these -- writing. And as this blog represents one of the few public vehicles I have available at the moment, I chose to write here as part of my effort to salvage the day. The preceding passages are the result.

Post Script: Just got a call from my friend Rohini. We talked for a while and I described how I was feeling: the feelings of negativity and so on. I conveyed my sense of embarrassment about my mind set and she said that feelings of negativity like that are common to most people. We all tend to focus on the bad things in life rather than the good. I ventured to suggest that it perhaps has to do with the fact that the bad things in life are remembered more because they are relatively rare and hence stand out more in our minds. She agreed that this could be a possibility.