Someone should have warned me. Someone should have warned me not to make a mess of my life in the way that I did. Someone should have warned me not to make all those bad decisions. ‘Laugh yourself to pieces, cry yourself to sleep,’ sings the voice on the special radio that we all have in our heads. Laugh yourself to pieces, cry yourself to sleep. Laugh yourself to pieces, cry yourself to sleep. The little jingle we all know so well! Why did I have to end up being me, I ask myself. Why couldn’t I have been someone else? It doesn’t seem fair. It doesn’t seem fair that I should have to be me and yet no one else does. Everyone else gets to be someone else. Everyone else gets to be someone else. ‘Laugh yourself to pieces, cry yourself to sleep’, the voice in my head sings gleefully. Why do I have to be me – is there no justice in the world? How am I supposed to make my peace with this? The enormity of the unfairness beggars description – absolutely everyone else in the whole wide world gets to be someone else whilst I have to be me. I drew the short straw – I always draw the short straw. The tormenting thoughts are starting up again. It’s that time of day again; the time of day when I start going over all the bad decisions that I’ve ever made in my life and blaming myself for them. Who else would I blame, after all? The government? My parents perhaps? My possibilities keep narrowing down with every bad choice that I make and now I am reaping the harvest that I have sown. I was seeking the prize of self-validation of course – what other prize have I ever sought? It always seemed so important to me. The tormenting thoughts are so tormenting, aren’t they? Not that you know of course – only I know. Only I’m supposed to know. It’s kind of like a conspiracy, I guess you could say. Only I am allowed to know how bad it feels to be me. That’s ‘the conspiracy of me’! It sounds kind of stupid when I say this, I know. I sound like a bit of an idiot. Ecstatically joyful experiences can happen I know, but they just aren’t allowed to happen to me. That’s the difference: I’m never going to know what it feels like, and that’s an absolute fact. That’s just how it works. This is a very unbearable thing for me to think about, needless to say. It’s super unbearable. There is a kind of a mechanism at work here and I am astute enough to spot it. Probably lots of people wouldn’t be but I am, even though I’m aware that I don’t look as if I’m particularly astute. Happy people love being happy, they love having a great time. I have insight into that, but this insight is what alienates me even more from ever being happy myself and that’s where the vicious circle comes in. I don’t know if I am articulating this correctly or not. Insight is a tricky thing to articulate. It is my keen insight into how much very much happy people enjoy being happy and enjoy having a great time that means I shall never be happy myself. I wonder to myself if that makes any sense. Do people understand me when I say this? We have all got the very same radio playing in our heads but the actual song that is being played may be different in each case. Memories, huh? What can you say about them? We’ve all got them but they can often be very different. Very often they can be different. Maybe we don’t all have them of course – some of us might have amnesia. It’s wrong to make assumptions, of course. It is wrong to judge. People who judge are bad. ‘Laugh yourself to pieces, cry yourself to sleep,’ the voice on the radio says. I took the Hypnocratic Oath along with everyone else of course, but it stands for nothing now. We only act for profit these days; we’re desperate for self-validation. Or is that really what I wanted to say? I wanted to be great. I wanted so very much to be great but I never could be, of course. I never could be…