With regards to the feeling of giving up on something important—for some time now I've been trying to articulate a property common to many unpleasant feelings I've experienced, which is that they present not only their particular character but a sense of necessity besides.

Melancholy rewards indulgence with a heavier melancholy; anger rewards indulgence with a more indignant anger; anxiety rewards indulgence with a more acuminate anxiety; and so on. I mean reward not in any metaphorical sense; I think you can actually imagine these feelings triumphantly providing, over and over again, their own familiar substance. When you give in to these feelings, it really feels right. For instance, when I try to pull myself out of anxious spirals, the hardest feeling to fight is that of the spiral's sanctity. It's as though it were something morally commendable, a good fight I were waging from within the confines of my own head.

I suppose it's like desire in general. I find it hard to give up on any great measure of desire because I can't help but feel that there's something valuable in it...but this could very well be a quality of desire itself, that it feels worthwhile, and nothing greater.

I don't know if any of that will resonate with your own experience.

Disappointment, intention, aspiration, etc., can be heavy burdens, no doubt about it.

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~zampano wrote (thread):

It definitely resonates, yes. I find that thinking of mental illness in terms of addiction is often helpful--it's amazing how many of the metaphors for addiction carry over.

Aspiration is so often the crux, I find. It's great when it's fulfilled, but disappointing when it's not and equally rough to give up upon. I don't yet know how to make realistic aspirations, more in terms of specificity than scale.