A Writer's Notebook, Day Nine-Hundred-And-Eighty-Nine

I need to find a way to calibrate my efforts, a metric for determining how close or far I am from getting where I am seeking to go.  It must be something that can always be updated to show my current progress, and it must be consistent, and I need to have a sense of what parameters are important and how they impact the results.  Without this, I am doomed to just wander about, becoming crazier and crazier.  To me, the choices I have right now are only between doing what I am doing and not succeeding or choosing to accept that I am a failure who wasted the chance I have for existing in this world.  I can't find an alternative path, or another thing that matters to me, or a secondary focus to distract or occupy me.  The truth, for me, is nothing else matters, and pretending that an alternative could be acceptable is just painful.  I have an awareness of how ridiculous I sound, and of how much it seems wrong for me to keep pressing this point, but I have nothing else that I can do.  I am stuck here.  The only path that is valid, that I am even willing to consider, is the one that I know leads towards my goals in concrete, discernible ways.  I refuse to exist in a world where that is not plausible, and I do not know what that even means, other than to say that it is too late for anyone to confront me with the idea that what I chose to pursue twenty years back, when I was young and impressionable and had people make it clear this was a real choice and one that would be good for me, it is too late for that to be a thing I will hear.  If I am forced to accept it as the only possible truth, it will break me.  I know it is insane.  It is not possible for me to find what does not exist, what everyone says does not exist.  I am rational enough to be aware of this, but I know, as well, I cannot accept it.  It would be too dangerous, would destroy me, so instead, I must find what I am seeking.  I need help, but it must be help that accepts this premise and seeks to solve the problem I have defined, not to pretend I must change to have a different problem based on other goals.

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