Other people have gone through all the hardships you went through.

Second-hand books sometimes have underlining that stops halfway through a chapter. Somebody was reading the same page you're reading, at the same speed, in a year you know nothing about.

Hard times isolate partly because they feel unprecedented. Nobody has had this exact version, with these particular people in it. That's true, and it's also true that the shape is very old.

It doesn't make anything lighter. What it removes is the extra weight of believing you've failed at something everybody else manages, and that weight is worth putting down.