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I am drowning in negativism, self-hate, doubt, madness - and even I am not strong enough to deny the routine, the rote, to simplify. No, I go plodding on, afraid that the blank hell in back of my eyes will break through, spewing forth like a dark pestilence; afraid that the disease which eats away the pith of my body with merciless impersonality will break forth in obvious sores and warts, screaming “Traitor, sinner, imposter.

I can’t be in a relationship with anyone. I’m still having an affair with my insecurities.

I’ll kill myself. I am beyond help. No one here has time to probe, to aid me in understanding myself, so many others are worse off than I. How can I selfishly demand help, solace, guidance? No, it is my own mess, and even if now I have lost my sense of perspective, thereby my creative sense of humor, I will not let myself get sick, go mad, or retreat like a child into blubbering on someone else’s shoulder. Masks are the order of the day - and the least I can do is cultivate the illusion that I am serene, not hollow and afraid.

I knew it wasn’t too important, but it made me sad anyway.

I enjoy controlled loneliness. I like wandering around the city alone. I’m not afraid of coming back to an empty flat and lying down in an empty bed. I’m afraid of having no one to miss, of having no one to love.

I can feel it again. There’s something wrong in my head

I tried to talk myself out of my depression. I tried to look at my life and realize how much I had to be grateful for: parents who were able and willing to take me back in after graduation, clothes to wear, food to eat, friends who loved (and for the most part) understood me. But there were days I couldn’t fight the despair, when it was all I could do to keep my fragile mental stability in place long enough to get through a meal with my family without breaking down into tears.

Since we all inhabit the earth, all of us are considered earthlings. There is no sexism, no racism or speciesism in the term earthling. It encompasses each and every one of us: warm or cold blooded, mammal, vertebrate or invertebrate, bird, reptile, amphibian, fish, and humans alike. Humans, therefore, being not the only species on the planet, share this world with millions of other living creatures, as we all evolve here together.

I don’t know how to tell people that I feel miserable and that I’m afraid of being alive in this body, that I feel disconnected from this Earth and its inhabitants. I don’t know how to say that I miss people who have left and that all I’m feeling is absence; it keeps punching me in the face, leaving me bloody and disoriented but it has no mercy on me because I keep getting hit with the force of its swings with each passing day. I don’t know how to tell people that I feel like a shadow, a ghost of a person; I am visible, but not reachable or tangible. I don’t know how to say that I continuously reach for a hand to hold, only to painfully realize that I’m sticking my hand out into the void; there is no one there to reach for.