I am miserable now — not feeling unhappiness, just lack of life coming to me and coming out of me — resignation to getting nothing and seeking nothing, staying behind shell. The glare of unknown love, human, unhad by me, — the tenderness I never had. I don’t want to be just a nothing, a sick blank, withdrawal into myself forever. I just want something, beside the emptiness I’ve carried around in me all my life.

I am afraid of falling into hopeless despair, over my wasted life, and I am still not sure how it happened.

My main goal is to stay alive. To keep fooling myself into hanging around. To keep getting up every day. Right now I live without inspiration. I go day to day and do the work because it's all I know. I know that if I keep moving I stand a chance. I must keep myself going until I find a reason to live. I need one so bad. On the other hand maybe I don't. Maybe it's all bullshit. Nothing I knew from my old life can help me here. Most of the things that I believed turned out to be useless. Appendages from someone else's life.

Everything I have I would give to not know what I know. To not feel emptiness as my constant companion. To not look into this room and be reminded why I'm in it. I'm not getting enough air. The room feels so small all of a sudden. It's pathetic to be this lonely and know it. To keep breathing. To be silent and alone. And to know.

I'm completely alone in the world; it frightens me to be so empty and lost.

How could I have gone almost overnight from being on top of the world to feeling useless, worthless, and washed up? I wanted to resume my duties, but there were no duties to resume. There was no goal, no sense of calling, no project worth pouring myself into. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I had started drinking more. Life seemed to have lost its luster. On some days I couldn’t even find a reason to get out of bed. So I didn’t. Something was wrong; something within me was beginning to crack. I only hoped that I could figure it out before I broke down completely.

exI feel unspeakably lonely. And I feel - drained. It is a blank state of mind and soul I cannot describe to you as I think it would not make any difference. Also it is a very private feeling I have - that of melting into a perpetual nervous breakdown. I am often questioning myself what I further want to do, who I further wish to be; which parts of me, exactly, are still functioning properly. No answers, darling. At all.

the truth is, I am heartily sick of this life & of the nineteenth century in general. (I am convinced that every thing is going wrong.)

I don't want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can't even see it, something that's drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead.

… if you knew the mess my life was in … the waste of it … the uselessness of it. I have no moral purpose, no real sense of duty to anything. It seems only a few months ago that I was twenty-one – full of hopes … all disappointed.

I am so angry with myself because I cannot do what I should like to do, and at such a moment one feels as if one were lying bound hand and foot at the bottom of a deep dark well, utterly helpless.

Overpowered by the sadness of not knowing <i>what</i> there is in the world, and what I'm doing. Feeling completely indifferent to good and evil too, to beauty or anything else. I know that <i>this</i> is the root of all human troubles, all of them. Indifferent to that knowledge, too. Nothing got written.

I feel the life slipping out of me. When the pain comes, I cry out, but there is no prayer in it, only fear. I kneel and recite my office and the Rosary but the words are empty - dry gourds rattling in the silence. The dark is terrible and I feel so alone. I see no signs but the symbols of contradiction. I try to dispose myself to faith, hope and charity, but my will is a blown reed in the winds of despair.

Some people never have any luck. All at once, as though a thick veil had been whisked aside, he clearly saw the wretchedness — the bottomless, monotonous wretchedness — of his existence. The wretchedness which had been, which was, and which was yet to come. His last days indistinguishable from the first, with nothing ahead of him or behind him or around him, nothing in his heart, nothing anywhere.

I am afraid! It is not starving I fear, or talking to people, or even being alone. But I cannot bear to be useless and ineffectual. There must be some meaning to me, if not to my life; there must surely be some purpose that has my name written on it. If this is not so, if I am deceiving myself about this too, then why should I want to become real? What reason have I to live anywhere?