It is one thing to read in the paper's how the country's unemployment is reaching 10% (and your own state's unemployment rate has already reached that and is climbing) and another thing entirely to hear how friends and relatives with far fancier resumes than you are desperately (and unsuccessfully) trying to find a job as well.

Although this does help explain some of my recent teary emotional outbursts. On further inspection, though, I think the true culprit is something far more sinister: The Past.
On talking with a good friend on this matter and trading emotionally scarring experiences he made a good point: that what makes us incredible people is not overcoming our past, but who we are in spite of it. Emotionally scarring events are just that: emotionally scarring. Scars don't go away (trust me- I have quite a few physical ones of my own as well). They stay with us as constant reminders long after the moment has passed, reminding us that the moment did happen and will forever be instilled upon our memory (barring amnesia or Alzheimer's, that is). To paraphrase my friend, our lives should not be about trying to find the moment when we will "get over" the past and move on with our lives, but accepting that these things did happen, as horrible (or just embarrassing) as the case may be, and learning to live with these memories. Not to repress them and thus seemingly "overcome" them, but to integrate them into our very selves, face them mano a mano as it were, and move on with them close to our hearts, scars that are permanent reminders of what we have been through and how we do (or don't) want to be.