Health we must have; and health is proportion; so that when a man comes into your room and says he is Christ (a common delusion), and has a message, as they mostly have, and threatens, as they often do, to kill himself, you invoke proportion; order rest in bed; rest in solitude; silence and rest; rest without friends, without books, without messages; six months' rest; until a man who went in weighing seven stone six comes out weighing twelve.

--Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

I.

I find that the times in which I want to stop living are correlated with the times in which I already feel like I'm not living, when my life is nothing but "rest without friends, without books, without messages." The routine of it only adds to the pain. It feels like some sick joke--how can you make a routine out of the absence of activity?

II.

I must be lying to myself at all hours of the day and every day of the week. If I just tell myself I'm a certain kind of person--a calm, self-assured, socially capable person with no hate nor spite in her heart--I can just be that person, and whatever negative feeling that bubbles up to the surface is nothing but one of those base animal reactions that can be discarded on the basis of irrationality. By extension I'm lying to others and they see right through me.

III.

Even as someone who loves language, it often feels inadequate. You can't just communicate everything at once in one big universally comprehensible burst. It’s one word after another and you're always anticipating something, some word that could alter all the words that came before it. There are interruptions, misused words, detours that you only realize were detours until after you went so far down and now you can't find your way back; or the time will never come to try to find your way back. For the whole rest of the conversation you just wish you could unsay everything or try to go backwards. But it's so unnatural, so phoned in, your attempt to bring order back to your words.