But if my aim in talking was mainly sociable – to get on with other people, to make friends – quite clearly there must be a lot of things which I did not talk about. For my private worries would bore others and my private foibles perhaps shock them. What then would happen to ideas on matters which were never talked of because I should feel too ashamed? I had never asked myself this question before, for I had grown up with a hatred of having my personal affairs discussed. When I listened to the personal talk of others I used sometimes to go hot all over, feeling it utterly impossible that I should ever talk like that about myself. I had thought that private affairs should be dealt with privately. What I had not realized was that usually, if I could not bear to deal with them in public, then they were also too painful to be dealt with in the privacy of my own mind. For, unless I was very clear what I was about, I tried to hide the painful thought just as urgently from my own eyes as from those of others.

As the time went on I found that my reactions thickened. Ordinarily I am a whistler. I stopped whistling. I stopped conversing with my dogs, and I believe that subtleties of feeling began to disappear until finally I was on a pleasure-pain basis. Then it occurred to me that the delicate shades of feeling, of reaction, are the result of communication, and without such communication they tend to disappear. A man with nothing to say has no words.

I’m not biochemically depressed. But I feel like I got to dip my toe in that wading pool and, um, not going back there is more important to me than anything. It’s like worse than anything—I don’t know if you’ve had any experience with this. It’s worse than any kind of physical injury, or any kind of—it may be what in the old days was called a spiritual crisis or whatever. It’s just feeling as though the entire, every axiom of your life turned out to be false, and there was actually nothing, and you were nothing, and it was all a delusion. And that you were better than everyone else because you saw that it was a delusion, and yet you were worse because you couldn’t function. And it was just, it was just horrible.

But the only other thing that seemed to be pulling me was the really sort of intense theoretical interest in fiction. Which then also seemed empty. Metafiction. And postmodernism. And what came after metafiction—like what would meta-metafiction be like? And what were ways to co-opt pop culture? And it’s very hard to explain. I think probably the not very sophisticated diagnosis is that I was just depressed.

The first thing I noticed was that in certain moods the very simplest things, even the glint of electric light on the water in my bath, gave me the most intense delight, while in others I seemed to be blind, unresponding and shut off, so that music I had loved, a spring day or the company of my friends, gave me no contentment.

I realized that in those two years, in order to preserve something—an inner hush maybe, maybe not—I had weaned myself from all the things I used to love—that every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at dinner had become an effort. I saw that for a long time I had not liked people and things, but only followed the rickety old pretense of liking. I saw that even my love for those closest to me was become only an attempt to love, that my casual relations—with an editor, a tobacco seller, the child of a friend, were only what I remembered I should do, from other days.

“You work a lot and [think], ‘Oh, gee, I don’t know anybody and the few people I do know are busy. So I’ll work some more.’ You keep working, you know less people, you do less things. Then pretty soon all you have left is work.” Then even work seemed hollow and uncomfortable, becoming a haunted house that maintained a strange hold even as he desperately plotted an escape.

I’d be at work at one of the series of thankless jobs I held throughout much of my life, seething with anger over how I could have been doing something better, more interesting, more suited to my talents or just less tedious and awful. This didn’t stop once I got finished with my shift, either. A huge segment of my life was given over to just feeling a kind of intense resentment toward whatever situation I was in.

Usually I lived with a general feeling that all would work out for the best, but this would be broken by occasional outbursts of misery in which I felt quite definitely that everything was hateful. These moments never lasted very long. Usually after a night's rest I would be back again in my vague optimism, never considering that my life was my own to live, that if I did not manage it as I wanted it no one else would. Into this smooth surface of taking things for granted there began to emerge an awareness of certain mental discomforts which up till then I had not known, only suffered.