The dead-end was everywhere. Everywhere she went, everyone she met, every life situation she faced was infused with the gloom of hopelessness and despair.

In relations, in career, at school, and with friends, she felt the doors kept slamming in her face or even worse, she saw no doors, just the concrete wall, cold and unbreakable.

Her mornings felt greyish, by noon the depression gradually waned turning desperation into the slightly lighter afternoons when her mind started generating more and more new ideas how to break damn the wall, how to fight the dark endlessness, and to finally make a change in her life. She got involved in copious projects insanely wasting herself on buying stocks and selling lipsticks; her afternoons were the time she had sparkles of hope that she is moving somewhere temporary silencing the dead-end anguish.

Her evenings started with routine workouts and phone calls from men offering the sugar-baby fix: “How much do you need to leave your job and stay with me, hun? You and your son are pretty amazing, give me the number, and you will get paid as soon as you move in” .

It is crazy, you are crazy, – her body was shaking with tears and laughter. Small, pale, anorexically thin, showing ribs through nearly transparent skin. Anemic and unable to look through the dead-end. Desperate and distressed – the more she tried the less resolution she saw.

She knew that going to bed at night slightly hyper with new thoughts and ideas was a very temporary relief; since each morning began with falling into the gloom of a new depressive episode.

I tried to help. I tried to plant a seed of common sense in her hysterical, “I will NEVER EVER change anything in my life”. I gave her some reasoning, which I thought would work, but she was blind and deaf, totally married to her problems and obsessive about doing, doing, doing, acting, acting, acting to find the way-out.

It happened late in the afternoon when I left a beauty store absorbing Florida warmth with every cell of my body. I felt her in a usually strapless dress, holding a rose soup, and looking for the vehicle. Petite, nervous, and fearful. I suddenly realized that it does not make any sense to argue that the dead-end is only in her head; and that her frantic efforts to act are as illusory as the problem that she created.

I realized that she will always be here, scared, tiny, subservient and naïve. She is one of myriad personalities the mind creates on a daily basis; and proving to her that neither her dead-end, nor she exists is a waste of time and energy.

I got tired of reacting to her drama, enticing victimization, the infinite desire to resist and fight. Her presence did not bother me, I did not care.

I found the vehicle, put the scented soap on the front seat, and smiled to the rear-view mirror. I was not sure which personality I saw, but I did not care, it did not matter to me any longer.