I’m getting used to being totally at the whim of my emotions. They’re running the show at the moment, the autocrats dictating how I’ll experience life from one day to the next. Wake up on a weekday morning — I’m alone, but in a now-familiar place, sunlight streaming in, everything’s fine. Shower, eat breakfast, walk out the door — beautiful day, feeling good, life is a pretty nice place to be, all in all. Reach my subway stop just in time to see a man kissing his wife goodbye and — Boom! I dissolve into tears. Wipe, rinse, repeat.

At night I come home and read wrenching stories about the human misery in China and Burma (screw “Myanmar” — when you willingly decline to inform your citizens that a massive, deadly cyclone is heading straight towards their heads, you lose the right to quibble over names) and pore through books about the starvation caused by overpopulation, our inability to control the AIDS epidemic, the upswing in human trafficking — the list goes on. Here, I tell myself, is real suffering — in the gamble of human existence, these people lost it all without even getting a chance to bet. Compared to them, I’ve got a winning hand. What do I have to be upset about?

But it’s a pointless tactic, trying to guilt yourself into not feeling bad by telling yourself that other people feel worse. The guilt does nothing to relieve the sorrow, and then the two exist as separate hurts — sort of like trying to heal a broken leg by slashing your arm with a Bowie knife. Unhappiness, I’ve learned, can live quite comfortably on its own, feeding off whatever it can, and it doesn’t respond to logical reasoning or concise arguments — picture trying to ward off a nasty case of food poisoning by explaining to the microbes that “there are people dying of cholera, which is far worse than what you could ever do to me, so you may as well quit now.”

So I figure nothing to do but wait it out — everything ends eventually — and accept the fact that whatever upset I’m carrying now will give me something to remember fondly when something even worse lumbers down the road.