I pictured this year a little bit different...

I made spasmodic efforts to work, assuring myself that once I began working I would forget. The difficulty was in beginning. There was a feeling of weakness, a sort of powerlessness now, as though I were about to be ill but was never quite ill enough, as though I were about to come down with something I did not quite come down with. I wondered, what was it that all my life I had so carefully guarded myself against? What was it that I had felt so threatened me? My suffering, which seemed to me to be a strict consequence of having shielded myself so long, appeared to me as a kind of punishment, and this moment, which I was now enduring, as something which had been delayed for half a lifetime. 

I was experiencing, apparently, an obscure crisis of some kind. My world acquired a tendency to crumble as easily as a soda cracker. I found myself horribly susceptible to random awkward encounters, the fantasises that defied even my shaky sense of logic, songs played late at night over lonely thoughts. It became particularly dangerous for me to start conversations that would imply the smallest amount of dissension. I had become excessively tender to all the more obvious evidences of the frailness of existence; I was capable of dissolving at the least kind word, and self-pity, in inexhaustible doses, lay close to my outraged surface. I moved painfully, an ambulatory case, mysteriously injured. But no more. I am done, because in fact, there is no crisis, besides the voices in my head.