What a strange, tangled four years this has been.  Emerging from the mess that is currently my life is ME.  Thanks to many factors - my friend Garlon at work, all the reading I've been doing, and a disciplining of my own stubborn mind, to name a few - I am a man, and no one can shake that.  Not my manager at work, not a rude customer, not a woman who lacks interest in me, not my own father.  Enh... I might be able to undermine myself if I'm not careful, but I doubt else will ever be the case.  (In fact, a woman I was crazy about just turned me down recently, and while I wasn't particularly happy about it, my life barely skipped a beat, let alone sunk back to old depressions.  That in itself speaks volumes.)

I have also been doing some memorization of late - here is the first thing I memorized, at the behest of www.artofmanliness.com:

IF

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait, and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream, and not make dreams your master,
If you can think, and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
And watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them, "Hold on,"

If you can speak to crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings, nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth, and everything that's in it,
And - which is more! - you'll be a Man, my son.

~ Rudyard Kipling

The second, again found on the same website... the "Man in the Arena" portion of a Presidential speech:

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man
stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.  The credit
belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust
and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs; who comes short again
and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who
does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great
devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the
end the triumph of high achievement; and who at the worst, if he fails, at least
fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and
timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

~ Theodore Roosevelt

(Both typed from memory, so note there may be some punctuation/capitalization mistakes.)

Reciting these to myself at work and at home has proven them to be worth their weight in gold... though I guess paper, ink, and synapses don't weigh very much, so maybe a billion times their weight?  They've turned many a brutal day around.  Combine these with the book Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman and you have a nearly impenetrable mental and emotional fortress.

The latter piece of famous writing above has been particularly inspiring to me of late.  I have been holding the same dreary retail job for two years - note that I am not saying I regret it, or that a retail job cannot be honorable or worthwhile.  The lessons learned have been invaluable, and someone in the world has to do these jobs, and sticking a job out for two years has been worthy cause in itself.  However, part of me suspects - nay, confirms - that I am flowing downstream, and it's time to paddle.  I'll be dropping my job to two days a week and making MUSIC my full-time job on the former workdays... with an eye toward writing music for a living.  This will be one of the hardest things I've ever done, and leaving some of the financial security is scary, but I need to do this.  If I stay in retail, I'll be no less of a man, in troth - but what of my dreams?  It is time to chase them, so here I go!  If I fail, I'll not hang my head, but raise it proudly to say I gave my best.

This is going to be an interesting year...