ooops

"Now I'm where I want to be and who I want to be and doing what I always said I would and yet I feel I haven't won at all."  (Eb - E - E - Eb - E - E).  Or something.  I've got a bad case of the "oh shit" blues.

But, in better words than mine, "It is clear that, crushed as it was, my 'self' had survived and needed only a short breathing space to come into its own again - it is particularly active in old age when a certain peace of mind has been achieved, but before the pain of past years has died away.  Later, the pain too no doubt goes and gives way to senile complacency, but I have not reached this stage yet.  Then it will be too late to write - pain acts like a leaven for both word and thought, quickening your sense of reality and the true logic of this world.  Without pain you cannot distinguish the creative element that builds and sustains life from its opposite - the forces of death and destruction which are always for some reason very seductive, seeming at first sight to be logically plausible, and perhaps even irresistible.  I feel my pain keenly now, and am going to write about myself alone." --Nadezhda Mandelstam.