So you know how you could be doing your worky things, your socialness, your health stuff, your familiality, your braining, your sexy time, and really your entire life, much better than you currently are? And no matter how hard you try, you’re never living up to expectations or meeting goals?

That’s because it’s impossible. No literally, impossible. You will never hit that line where you get to feel successful because that line is never where you think it is. First, it’s right above your head, so you raise your arm to grab it. Then you realize it’s right beyond your finger tips, so you go get a chair. Then when you stand on tip-toe on top of the chair, it’s already on the ceiling. No matter what you do, that line of “success” will keep moving.

Your depression makes everything you accomplish feel like nothing, and also convinces you that if you can just do one more thing, all of a sudden you’ll finally feel complete. Really, you’re just fucked and you will never reach that line. What a joke. There’s always more opportunities that you are missing out on, or special things that you could become. Or maybe there are things you did perfectly in the past, and now you regret losing that. That line of “success” is set too far ahead of you or even already behind you, and is just so impossible to reach.

The good news is: fuck success. Your well-being isn’t determined by reaching some arbitrary definition of completion, it’s about putting as much distance as you can between you and the deep pit of your depression. Your baseline is not what you’re striving towards, it’s what you’ve come from. The lowest point in your life is where the bar is truly set, and your goal is to do even slightly better than that point.

And what if you don’t? What if you fall below the bar? The good news is: you can’t. If you get lower than the lowest part of your life, then the bar is set there. So no matter what, you are always doing at or better than that bar, your base zero. This may seem too easy. Or just unrealistic. And in some ways it is. Still, it’s way more rational than that arbitrary line of success. Your lowest low is something definite and clear that you can do your best to rise from. Your highest high on the other hand, well, who the fuck knows?

So fuck setting your baseline on the ceiling. Set it in that hole you dug the last time you were depressed. It’s easier to measure a baseline that actually exists. And that way when you are at your lowest is when you have everything to gain. You want to keep striving, and aiming for the sky? That’s great. Start by getting your feet on solid ground, and keep working from there.