I lived with this thought most of my life.  I’ve been through things that people would never imagine.  I always kept my head up, but deep down I truly believed there was nothing I could do to change my circumstances.  I think I felt that smiling through it all would make it disappear, but I realized that I needed to do something.  Heck, I needed to do a lot of things.  But I took it one step at a time and I started changing my life.  Tons of work left to be done, but just the simple fact that others had it far worse off than I, and were still happy and successful and in charge of their lives made me start seeing things differently.  OWN your stuff.  You can change your stars – Knights Tale reference there.