[passage from my journal, 16 October 1991, 4:05 a.m. PDT]
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ight horrors upon me again; no point in struggling I guess,
but I hate every minute of it. Bad bad bad bad bad bad. Self-pity I suppose if
there is such a thing, but it doesn’t feel like pity at all—not for myself, not
for anyone. Not for anything. It just feels bad. Pointless, empty, unreal—a
sharp pain high in the chest, sort of above and behind the lungs, and nothing
at all where the soul ought to be. Just fucking pointless is all. Is this what
they mean when they talk about feeling sorry for yourself? Sorrow is what you
feel when you’ve lost something, and I know that feeling, even if not
intensely. And as I think about it, who can you feel sorrow for except
yourself? You can feel empathy or even sympathy with someone else’s sorrow, but
you cannot feel their sorrow. If you feel sorrow, you feel it for yourself,
inevitably. But this bad feeling I have, the one I call depression, is not sorrow.
It is a different bad feeling. Sorrow heals, but depression is more like a
sorrow that’s become infected. Sorrow is positive; depression is negative.
Depression is like darkness, like numbness. Sorrow is something; depression is
nothing. If you’re filled with sorrow at least you’re alive; to be filled with
depression is like saying that a hole is full of emptiness. Damn it to fucking
hell. [16 Oc 1991]
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