If it came down to it, I had everything. Everything I could possibly need. But I certainly was vulnerable to extreme mood swings which would render every element of my life disproportionally irrelevant, or worse, humiliating. I believe it has been described to me as a temperament of the planets Pluto and Mars combined. I lived indeed as if in exile, quite deliberately closed to trends and social contact. Perhaps I had something to prove, perhaps just the opposite. I am in no way an objective party. I know I felt very much disillusioned, and also strangely very old; rather tired than wise, in many moments I found myself the spectator to a human exchange which repulsed me with the constancy, and blatancy of human nature. Such an attitude did not fail to leave me broken by solitude, which I sometimes could alleviate by a physical and arguably psychological alienation. This, I assume, is what others see as a hermitage. In many ways I perceived this as a state of oversensitivity, and both prided and punished myself for it. I say punished, for it was in fact exactly what I did; indeed extreme, I often would turn inward the immensity of my disillusion to find within myself the blame and channel to a deflated, embarrassed rage. Whether with brooding thoughts or blades, I would tear myself to pieces. My instinctive reaction to this masochism was quite simple -why not? And my reader may now choose to dismiss my person as dysfunctional. My passions in fact never wanted to leave me intolerably restless, loaded with energy too unstable to channel; and if I have learned anything, it has been to drain myself from it. One may perhaps find such a notion strange; I may simply be reviving the XVIIth century medicinal practice, la saignée. The image which withstands of the culmination of my passions is one of disturbing self-loathing, perversely aggressive: to bleed, to suffer was therefore purely purgative. I punished myself.
If while young I attempted at my own life, I quickly accepted that it was easier to live, to live indeed with nurtured hope, however irrational. And in some ways, my extremes grew more predictable, and more manageable. It expressed perhaps a resignation to endure them. It has been my deepest fear that I may one day become entirely dysfunctional; but greater still was the fear that I may already be, concealing unnatural efforts to think clearly. In some fantasies I gave up this struggle; and my peculiar fascination with psychiatric wards, prisons, and extreme poverty comes from an intimate projection of my vacillating emotional stability.

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