My interior image of how my life works goes something like this:
I'm lazy, I finally get myself up, I walk for a bit, I fall, I'm exhausted, I get up, I walk for a bit, I fall, rinse, lather and repeat - and I'm mired in ADD, depression, commitment problems and terminal self-doubt the whole way down. If there's "progress," I barely notice it. Life is frustrating, and indeterminate, and there's no way out. I'm giddy when I'm up, depressed when I'm not, and want to kill myself when I'm down; my mood fluctuates how it will, and I can't much control it. Habits are a difficult thing. There's no way out.

Today, though, I had a therapeutic phone call with my brother - which I do periodically - and he reminded me of something that he reminds me of every time I have one of these calls with him, more or less: that he really, honest-to-god sees me making tremendous progress in life. He didn't always know if I was going to make my way, but he sees me doing it now, and he believes that my goals really are perfectly achievable and within my grasp.

It's a difficult dissonance to make my way through. I feel like it can at least provide a little bit of a respite from my doubt, though; my brother says that he struggles with many of the same things that I do, but while I've been struggling, he graduated from Dartmouth College and has been making his way up the rungs of what looks like a big public policy career.
Then again, as he would be first to point out to me, he wouldn't be able to draw how I can draw. It's good to have someone there to remind you of that.

I guess I'm interested in knowing how other people struggle with not feeling like they're getting anywhere, having an unreliable interior sense of progress/regress. Tell my I'm normal!