It is not happiness I want, but vitality.

//

Maybe it's not depression. Maybe what I feel is a sense of being deeply compromised. Against my better wishes (the uneven ground, perhaps, for a moral reflex), I feel complicit in what's wrong with the world, a perpetrator of violence against nature, and of my own increasingly repressed nature.

Also: I feel shut from my inner life. I don't carve out the time (carve! as if time was meat or wood) to write, and to feel, on that occasion, an opening giving way to other worlds. When I wrote letters as a teenager, long digressive letters sometimes written from the point-of-views of fictional characters, it wasn't for other people, but to respond to some vague, deeply interior need that was satisfied only by filling a page with words, worlds, conjured from the wellspring of my juvenile imagination.

I wouldn't say that need was to express "myself", because I don't think I had a self at that time, and if I did, it was severely limited by the orbit of my mother. But when I was writing a letter, I felt that I had some volition, a power outside of my mother and school and the suburbs. I was captain of my destiny, tapping into the source of my own vitality. In a way, these diary entries are my attempts to capture that volition, to escape the vicissitudes of my present. (Is that sense of volition, then, what we might call a "self"?)

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