For those of you who don’t know, I’m not just the epitome of emotional stability. Surprise!

And as I was driving home from dinner with some friends, I began to compose this little ditty, and what follows is the metaphor I’ve been trying to conjure for some time to try to describe this particular lifestyle I lead.

For the past two weeks, I have been stuck in a revolving door lifestyle. On one side of the edifice, I am light, bright, sociable; hell, I would even say I was happy. As the door revolved endlessly on its vertical axis, I began to change. I was dark, dim, withdrawn; hell, I would even say I was miserable.

There’s really no reason for the change, per se. I would just revolve freely, gliding between the antithetical moods wondering just why I was, all of a sudden, so incredibly unhappy, when just the day before (or even the hour before) I was so incredibly happy.

This revolving door lifestyle, then, causes me (and, probably more acutely, my friends) some distress. You see, as relationships go, you’ve got to go through the door sometime, and while people may politely continue walking in circles with you for a while, they’ll eventually go ahead and step out of the monotony, and the better of them will go ahead and wait for you just inside the door, but eventually, they’ve got to make their appointments, and if you’re still stuck in the door, then you’ve just got to watch out for when their meetings are done, because they might come back and wait, or they might walk on through the door, or they might just hop back in and walk in circles. (If, however, they were meeting someone for lunch, then you might want to ask them to wait a while because no one wants their revolving door ride to be fouled by the stench of fresh sick all over the floor).

Anyway, the point is, being caught in revolving door after revolving door (either having moved forward to the next one or, sometimes, back to a previous one) causes my progress into the grand Hotel called life, where strange and bizarre things take place, but you’ve got to go ahead and step through the door. Sometimes I ask myself what’s so scary about the inside of that building.

Maybe it’s because I’m afraid that if I step through the door, I’ll find myself in a hall of mirrors and will have to see myself for who I really am. On the one side, I’ll see the bright, happy side; on the other, I’ll see the dark, insidious and cynical beast.

When will I stop going in circles and just take a step forward?