Dying is only one thing to be sad over … Living unhappily is something else.

You do pointless things that you do not like. You want money or the biggest house, but in truth you will not be happy with it.

If you are not happy with how your life is going, then you are not living at all. Life has become a job to you.

For all these years of quick changes and rash decisions, which you once rationalized as adventurous, exploratory, and living an original life, you have nothing to show for it.

You have no wealth, and you are now saddled with enough debt from all of your moves and poor decisions.

You have no family nearby, no long-term relationship built on years of mutual growth and shared experiences, no children.

While you make friends easily, you have left most of your friends behind in each city you have moved from while they have continued to grow deep roots: marriages, community, families, children.

You used to consider yourself creative – a good writer, poetic, passionate, curious. Now, after many years of demanding yet uninspiring jobs, multiple heartbreaks, move after move, financial woes, you are exhausted.

You find artists offensive because you are jealous and do not understand how you landed this far away from yourself.

No one knows who you are or where you have been. You have not kept a friend or lover around long enough to give anyone a chance. What is the point. You do not care for your job.

You are not building toward anything, and you do not have the time or money to really invest in what you care about.

You used to think you were the one who had it all figured out. Adventurous life in the city. Traveling the World. Making memories. Now you feel incredibly hollow. And foolish.

How can you make a future for yourself that you can get excited about out of these wasted years.

Art is not something you need an outside license or a paycheck to pursue. It is a way of life. It is a way of adding up what you feel and where you have been and what you fear and what you can imagine.

It is a way of seeing your life through a lens that makes everything – good and bad, confusing and clarifying, uplifting and depressing – valuable.

Shame is the opposite of art. When you live inside of your shame, everything you see is inadequate and embarrassing.

A lifetime of traveling and having adventures and not being tethered to long-term commitments looks empty and pathetic and foolish, through the lens of shame.

You have not found a partner. Your face is aging. Your body grows weaker. Your mind is less elastic. Your time is running out.

Shame turns every emotion into the manifestation of some personality flaw, every choice into a giant mistake, into a moral failure.

Shame means that you are damned and you have accomplished nothing and it is all downhill from here.

When you are curious about your shame instead of afraid of it, you can see the true texture of the day and the richness of the moment.

When you face your shame with an open heart, you are on a path to art, on a path to finding joy and misery and fear and hope in the folds of your day.