There are walls around my heart, a veil on my brain and a knot in my throat. All I do is try; to be understood, to understand, to love and be loved, to find out who I am. I am surrounded by crowds and I lose myself in them, every time a little piece of me escapes and now there is nothing left. My heart and brain have turned to ash, yet the knot is still there. The words I have never spoken perpetually haunt me, stuck in my throat for all eternity.

I’m still depressed, but how depressed I am varies, which is good. Much of the time, it’s a comfortable numbness that just makes things feel muted. Other times, I’m standing in the shower or something and I can feel the nothingness hurtling toward me at eight thousand miles per hour and there’s nothing I can really do aside from let it happen and wait until it goes away again.

I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones.

The more I thought about my life up to then, the more I hated myself. It wasn’t that I didn’t have a few good memories—I did. A handful of happy experiences. But, if you added them up, the shameful, painful memories far outnumbered the others. When I thought of how I’d been living, how I’d been approaching life, it was all so trite, so miserably pointless. Unimaginative middle-class rubbish, and I wanted to gather it all up and stuff it away in some drawer. Or else light it on fire and watch it go up in smoke (though what kind of smoke it would emit I had no idea).