Hello,

I am sure a lot of you have been told by a therapist or maybe even just friends/the internet, to try and focus on a place that makes you feel happy and safe when you are feeling awful. I always imagine the same place but over the years it has gotten more and more detailed. It went from just a little scenery to a town, to a whole country with specific laws and government systems and everything. I have become obsessed with it. I am diagnosed bipolar and I don't know if this is the reason that I cannot stop thinking of ways to make this "happy place" a REAL place. This started about ten years ago. I started to use games like Sims "World Creator" to try and replicate this place in my head. I would draw fake maps and realize how crazy it was that I was doing this and throw them out. I did all of this as an adult. I try to think of ways I can raise money to buy the properties around me and have my friends move in and become our own little world.

But when I start to "come down" I realize this place is not and never will be real. Even if I put in motion today to achieve what I would need to in order to create this little society, I would literally die before it was ever realized. I have said this to myself to sort of reason with my own nonsense....but then I am overwhelmed with sadness. I feel so heart broken that I am stuck in a place I do not want to be and would die before I could ever make the changes to help the world be better. (My version of better, I know there are other people in the world who would disagree with me). When I realize that this is it, this is the world I was given, I just want to die. I am back to square one with my depression. I am left to only focus on where I really am; stuck in a place full of hypocrisy, racism, poverty, ignorance, closed-mindedness, mysogyny, hatred, bigotry, prejudice, pollution, litter, abuse, greed, plastic and everything else this awful species has forced onto the earth. I feel so helpless and so broken and so sad.

When I feel this awful, I am supposed to go to my "happy place". But now whenever I think of it, I am only reminded of what I can never have. Maybe if heaven is real, this is what it will be like. But that will bring on more dangerous thoughts and I am too afraid to go there.