As everyone in the tristate area probably knows at this point, I am depressed. I’ve made a lot of improvement as I try to take the initiative to get out and do things more often, but it can be difficult to recondition and manipulate my brain into letting my body function again.

Today, I wanted to clean my car. I felt like it had been a problem for a long time, and I was finally in a place where it felt attainable. I got in my car and decided to start by putting my 2009 Ford Edge through the car wash.

I sideswiped the sign going in.

I tried to pull over and check the damage, but there was a vehicle behind me. I decided to continue through the car wash, stressed the fuck out.

I ended up pulling into a parking spot afterward, and the damage was much worse than it had felt or sounded—at least from my perception.

The irony of this whole situation was the fact that I was trying to make my car nicer, but in the process, I made the situation much, much worse.

Immediately, I thought, How much is it going to cost to repaint this door? or How much is it going to cost to replace these panels? I was so fucking upset and fixated on this damage.

But after the initial anxiety and frustration wore off, I had to look at the situation objectively—something I was physically incapable of doing prior to recovery.

There comes a time in life where I have to realize that trying to work with these feelings is completely futile. It’s not cheating to bring a gun to a knife fight when the person holding the knife has 5,000 arms, also holding knives, with an intention to kill. I really had to face this obsessive tendency with an equally obsessive desire to just fucking kill it.

It’s important not to dismiss your feelings or desires to validate yourself when something doesn’t feel quite right. But that also means validating the feeling that your response to something might be completely and inherently unnecessary.

This scuff on my 17-year-old car was bigger in my mind than it is in the grand scheme of my life.

I hate terms like “…and the world keeps spinning” in response to a seemingly mundane inconvenience. For me, I feel the need to say, “Hey, I think this is really fucking bad,” and leave it there.

I’m not playing games with myself anymore. Yes, the world keeps spinning. But right now, my brain isn’t going to give two fucking shits about that. Dismissing unnecessary feelings by comparing them to worse situations just leads me to rationalize and project responsibility elsewhere—while ignoring the fact that I’m still feeling them in the first place.

Yeah, alright, I got myself into a difficult situation. Immensely avoidable, too. What else? Am I really going to sit here and think about every fucking perspective and criticism in relation to this? Am I going to do that after every single mistake I make in my life?

Just like how the damage was avoidable, so is the misery I choose to feel in this situation. I can’t undo scraping the sign at the car wash. But I can stop myself from letting this cause any more damage than what’s already been done to my car.