Hunger

Joy, like meat and potatoes, is the good food of life. It nourishes and strengthens, improving the mind and the will - though its effects are perhaps slow and difficult to observe. It is best noticed by its absence.

When the joy is gone, however, when sadness like hunger saps your strength and darkens your days, one turns to determination. It is the foil-wrapped survival rations of the soul, what one needs to survive and nothing more. It does the job, undoubtedly, but it is always somehow in short supply.

After the last foil wrapper is anger - a thin, thin soup compared to what went before. At the end of determination, when surrender's sweet siren song serenades, you can boil up what is left and draw out the last dregs of sustenance from the memory of better times. It is poor fare, barely keeping body and soul together, and corrosive in its own way - a sign, like the soft sweet smell of ketones on the breath, that some vital process is broken inside.

But it shall suffice if it has to.