I can never tell if anything I do is really good. I'm always just slightly chagrined.
The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.
Every single day the world seems like it is on the brink of falling apart. But then I look outside my window, and things look about the same as they did a week ago. It's almost a form of cognitive dissonance.
To carry care to bed is to sleep with a pack on your back.
Depression, for me, wasn't a dulling but a sharpening, an intensifying, as though I had been living my life in a shell, and now the shell wasn't there. It was total exposure.
What is the life of man! Is it not to shift from side to side? From sorrow to sorrow? To button up one cause of vexation! And unbutton another!
Doubts never end. If one doubt is removed, another takes its place. It is like removing the leaves of a tree one by one. Even if all the leaves are clipped off, new ones grow. The tree itself must be uprooted.
If you live with a certain amount of dread for your own personal safety every day, that is anxiety.
That's the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it's impossible to ever see the end. The fog is like a cage without a key.
