A Writer's Notebook, Two-Thousand-And-Eighty-Three

I am feeling quite frustrated at the moment.  It is nothing new or different, really, but it is feeling more acute right now, or I think it is.  Maybe that is just in my imagination and it is always this bad, I just don't recall it with the same piquancy.  I do not think so, if I am honest.  I am pretty certain that I am not always as focused on the same things, that there are times when it ebbs, even if it never fully subsides.  I just wish that I knew some way to take action that would make me actually feel like I was making progress to really change some of these things.  I don't mean just making an effort.  I have been making an effort for a long time and that hasn't made a difference.  In some ways, keeping on with an effort that doesn't actually have a practical reward feels like a punishment, like I am Sisyphus destined to need to get that boulder all the way up.  I need a sense of real progress in terms of my actual, external goals, not just to keep doing the work.  Of course, there isn't any kind of action I can take that would work that way.  It isn't how things are and I am aware of that.  I know that I am in a situation where what I am wanting and needing is not realistic.  That does not make it any less necessary from my perspective.  Consider: telling a person there is absolutely no water does not stop them from being dehydrated.

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