Dear Advanced Writing Professor,
My project is very emotionally overwhelming. I hate both my characters because the male is too much like everything I've been frustrated with for months and months and the female is too much like me and I don't like me if I'm like her. Instead of dealing with my own problems, I am involving myself in fictional problems involving fictional people. I walk around feeling like shit because Tim doesn't love Dora yet and when he does love her, she is going to leave, and then Tim will feel even worse. I used to want Tim to feel worse, but Tim ordinarily feels like how I do now. You said he needs a hobby. The problem is that I have all of Dora's hobbies: I do work and I do more work and when things get too difficult for me emotionally I do all sort of literal and metaphorical running. I say that my writing and this story is what matters right now, but that is a lie. That is not what matters. I am trying to figure out what matters. I'm not sure if it is happiness, productivity, or satisfaction, but I'm starting to realize it's not productivity, because I am really productive right now, but there is this ache I wake up with and I've tried to fill it with doing my work, getting drunk, and talking to people and it doesn't go away. I don't know what it is or why I can't make it go away and I hate that it's there, because feeling sad seems so juvenile. That's what I did when I was a juvenile; I was sad and now I am not that young anymore so I should just be able to be happy. I keep getting confused as to why it doesn't work that why. Why I can't just stay busy and do better, with everything, and make myself happy. I act like happiness is some outer force, but it's not. It's an inner force that is failing me and thus I am failing myself. The question always is: what can I do to stop failing myself?