What I'm Mentally Going Through When S&P Dropped More Than 10% and I Have Large Long Positions

It was a normal intra-year "correction", according to JPM

I started trading stocks about 3 weeks ago before $SPX broke below SMA50. I had some gains doing day scratches and swings, partly because of luck and partly because of the technical analysis and research I did.

I entered long positions on S&P 500 index ETFs and some of the magnificent 7 stocks near all-time high, thinking that I was buying the "dip". I was wrong.

Last week the market bounced after the FOMC meeting on Wednesday, then it was long red candles the next 2 days (weak big tech earnings and bad econ data), and a large gap down over the weekend.

On Monday 8/5 morning, I woke up to see $SPY plummeting, $AMZN and friends were doing worse pre-market.

Over the weekend I was thinking about shorting the shares I was long (aka "shorting against the box"), and later learned that the practice is illegal and banned by brokers. Even if it's not banned, doing so is no different than selling all my positions and buy the next real dip, plus I don't have to pay the hefty cost for borrowing shares from my broker when everything is going down.

So I decided that I'm going to exit my positions on the next bounce. Hopefully there is one.

To mentally justify the loss, here are some of the ways I think to deal with the imminent large realized loss:

It's the tuition I pay for learning how to trade
I'll just add the loss to other events where I was ripped off, like the 2000%-normal-price flight ticket I bought, the $800 COVID tests I took, and months of being confined in a hotel room where I need to pay, all thanks to the CCP, and the times when I do unpaid work, sacrificing my free time for little gain.
The market will (likely and hopefully) recover in one year (See market cycles at the bottom)
Compared to those whose accounts got wiped out when they first started, I suffer from lower loss (for now)
It's okay. It hurts but I will survive.
At least I wasn't long $BP before the 2010 oil spill, or $INTC before the recent huge-huge gap down. BTW, Intel CPUs really suck.

I'm kind of angry that I don't have a futures account to hedge against this in time.

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