I wanted to take a relaxing bath and read in the tub, but I couldn’t find anything I wanted to read. So I lay on the bed trying to decide what I would do in the tub instead. I decided I would just lie there. Then I realized that I was already doing that on the bed, and that it would be easier to just remain on the bed, since I was already doing what I would be doing in the tub, rather than getting undressed, drawing a bath, climbing in, climbing back out, drying off, and getting dressed.

So I just stayed there on the bed. It turned out to be nearly as relaxing as the bath, and a lot less effort.

I got all these inspiring thoughts. I thought, first of all, “If I didn’t have this pin through my thorax and if I were not dead, I would fly away.” Almost immediately, I could hear my father and everyone else in his position reminding that there is dead and there is dead, and we must use the two words carefully and not mix them up.

And I thought, where I come from rainbows are black and have pots of tar at their ends. I could envision a book of aphorisms like that, illustrated by a child. Postcards, maybe.

And then I had this brilliant thought: If it is so hard being who you are, pick something easier and work your way back up. The trick is to find a you that requires a minimum of effort for you. Different people will require different energy levels for different selves. It’s not a one-size-fits-all thing. A certain existence might be easy for one person, hard for another. The result is that almost everyone is someone else, which is more interesting than if everyone were the same person.

Some people are who they are seemingly without effort, imbued with grace. Others, however, have personas and selves and so on which appear to require great effort, maybe even more energy than they have available, resulting in feelings of failure, insufficiency and exhaustion.

The mistake is in taking on these difficult selves too soon. They must be trained for, like a marathon or weightlifting.

The trick is to pick something easier and work your way back up. If you find it hard being lonely and unhappy, try being happy first. Lonely and happy, for example. If that’s still too hard, be happy and popular. How hard can that be? Then when you get used to that, crank it up a notch and try popular and unhappy, or happy and lonely. Then when that’s working for you, go back to lonely and unhappy and you’ll be amazed at the difference.

The trick is to do it in steps.