Reply #29: I'm going to be as nice about this as I can

[China_cat]

and suggest that you imagine yourself stuck in a room and that's all you ever see, not just for days on end but months. You watch the months turn into a couple years (or more) and you know there's no way that you can get out of that room and go anyplace else because you can't navigate more than a few steps and manage to breathe at the same time. Same thing, same place, same walls, day after day after day and you don't even have the excuse of being in jail to blame it on.

What it is is depressing. Thoroughly depressing. After a while you become convinced that the only way you're ever going to get out of that room is feet first in a pine box. Why should you have any energy? There's nothing to expend it on. Get up and go? Where? The bathroom again?

Then have somebody bring you a machine that makes it possible for you to even get down the driveway to get the mail again. And you can get out and 'walk' the dog, go to a mall, run to the grocery store on your own and not have to wait for somebody to go for you. Do you have any idea of the lift of spirits you can get just from something that simple? No, I guess not, or you wouldn't have typed your last sentence.

It's just SO much more than that.