Hell is anxiously checking for a response to a message you haven’t even typed yet, much less sent. It is having made a decision that you haven’t followed through on yet, essentially forcing you to make the decision over and over again as your mind picks at it. It is knowing that you have to keep making a decision every day for years if you want it to ever pay off, despite how far away that moment might be. It is knowing something and being unable to act on it, not now and probably not ever. It is all these moments of anixety and powerlessness and more besides. These days, I find myself steeped in such things: conversations I don’t know how to start, things I feel foolishly compelled to heavily qualify before sharing, decisions made long ago that I must stick to because nothing’s changed enough to reevaluate them, and recognitions of problems I can do nothing positive to resolve. All my other choices are worse than whatever I’ve picked, acting on anything will most-likely return bad results, and no amount of practice is going to make it any easier to start conversations I feel weird for having because I was trained to ask nothing of people and still struggle to ask for anything that might require other people to put in effort on my behalf. I hate being in these kinds of no-win-but-the-long-run situations and even my therapist agrees that my life is pretty much entirely made up of them these days. I just want problems that are easy to handle, a society that doesn’t feel like it is on the verge of collapsing, and the ability to ask things of people without feeling the need to preempt all the potential negative directions the conversation could go if I was misinterpreted.