Coming from a person who has spent considerably too much time enshrouded in gloom, I don't have any true words of wisdom to offer here, just a bit of reflection. I guess it's always painful when your life doesn't seem to be working out the way you'd like it to. At the same time you can know on an intellectual level that things will eventually change for the better, on a deeper level a sense of gloom clouds the way you look at the world and the way you feel about yourself and it's very hard to be hopeful despite having every reason to be hopeful.

Sometimes people make the mistake of assuming that they feel a certain way or that bad things have happened to them because that's what they deserve. But I know this isn't true. I've seen plenty of absolute jerks who are self-satisfied and end up getting just what they want out of their lives. Of course this isn't fair, but it happens.

I guess if we didn't have dark moments, we wouldn't appreciate it when we were truly happy. We wouldn't know it was something to be treasured because there would be nothing to compare it to. I'm not an advocate of suffering for suffering's sake, but when it does happen, you often emerge from it as a wiser and more compassionate person.

You said it scared you that you were losing belief in things that were important to you, like your sense of romanticism. I think that regaining this sense of belief comes from within, from an acceptance of who you are. Don't think that to be a good person you have to be everything that Crystal or anyone else might approve of. You have your own way of living your life and of looking at things that makes you unique and it's a mistake and hurtful to yourself to judge yourself negatively because you don't share another person's outlook.

I guess I say this because I spent the decade of my twenties in a fair amount of turmoil myself, believing that who I was wasn't good enough and that I ought to be living up to other people's standards and expectations. It was that and this feeling that what I wanted was unattainable because I was so undeserving of it. It's nothing I would want to see anyone else repeat.

But getting back to romanticism, I don't know exactly how you view it, but it's something worth holding onto, maybe with just a few minor alterations. Your knight in shining armor will ultimately appear to you albeit with a few dents in the metal, an unavoidable drawback of the profession.