I consider my troubles in that same light. Suppose one day -- maybe judgment day, maybe not -- everyone were taken to a barren field in which grew a menacing, craggy tree. We were to hang our sufferings there, on the branches for all to consider for trade - sort of an “adversity auction”. Voyeurs to pain, we cautiously look them over, considering them, pondering one person's divorce, another's car crash, someone’s disease, betrayals, and insanities. Do you think any of us would trade something in? How about a drive-by shooting for an amputated leg? Delusions of paranoia for being stalked? Would I trade in some depression for the seemingly less horrific compulsive hand-washing? Poverty for cancer? The woman who thinks the television news sends her secret messages, would she opt for the slightly more amusing notion that she is the anti-Christ? One man’s madness is another man’s miracle.

I think I would keep my pains -- every last one of them. Why deal with some unfamiliar neurosis, alien psychosis, when my own are so perfectly common and comfortable. Whether chaos or catastrophe, they are all mine. And mine are so knowable. I earned them. Every pain and poison was fashioned just for me and I for them. In their strange way, my torments make perfect sense. There’s no trading up.

Sadly, though perhaps thankfully, we would all march up to that prickly, poisonous, pain-riddled tree and from it pluck our own pathetic and peculiar problems. We could not even regret our regrets, such is the irony of living. Our foibles and faults, our mourning and madness: rotten apples, all of them, certain to make our stomachs' wretch. But we reclaim them, nonetheless. Maybe they make us feel full, or at home. Or like we finally deserve what we get -- though rarely get what we deserve.