I feel I am looking for freedom, looking for a way to escape. From what? I don't know. But the fact remains that there is something missing from my life. I'm like a hole missing its button, disjointed from the fabric of life. I feel disconnected and disinterested. I feel like I'm waiting for bad to get worse, with each passing headline increasing the amount of insanity in the world and each passing day increasing my sense of helplessness to make a difference for the better. For what is life?

It would be an untruth to say that it's a struggle for me to remain positive. Closer to the truth would be to say that it's a struggle for me to attain positivity occasionally. I can pray and I can hope or I can mope and despair, but either way it seems like the world is going down the toilet.

Ouch.

If you were to tell me at any point in the past that this would be my life, this life I now have, I would scarcely have believed you. But somehow it's not enough.

Jesus, if you're out there, what are you doing? What's going on with the world? Can't you stop all the carnage in your name? If you came to save us all, where did it go wrong? Are we just unfit material, us, Humanity? Where are we going? Where am I going?

I've come to feel that there's no good in looking to the past, that while analysing what went wrong and what went right it's like I'm driving with my eyes glued to the rear-view mirror.

At the same time I feel that I should be approaching the present with a sense of expectation, that I should be meeting it with a set of pre-framed questions. Maybe I need to set that mindset aside as well. Why is it so hard to change? Because I don't want to? Why don't I want to change? Why am I afraid?

I have long held that laughter is the most proper response to human tragedy - not coarse, mocking, insensitive laughter but a more gentle kind that tickles the softer edges of the blade. But in the end isn't such humour just another defence mechanism? Who cares whether my shell is green or black if I'm still living in a shell?

This is me, in a nutshell. Help, I'm in a nutshell! Who put me in this nutshell?