I became afraid that everyone was wrong - that my much-trumpeted existence might turn out to be utterly useless, void, and without the shred of a purpose.

Death doesn’t exist. It never did, it never will. But we’ve drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we’ve got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.

It all seems pointless in light of the fact that we’re all going to die eventually. Why do anything - why wash my hair, why read Moby Dick, why fall in love, why sit through six hours of Nicholas Nickleby, why spend time getting into the right schools, why dance to the music when all of us are just slouching toward the same inevitable conclusion? The shortness of life, I keep saying, makes everything seem pointless when I think about the longness of death.

The sense that, when you’re at the lowest you can possibly go, it’s kind of freeing, because the very worst thing that could possibly happen has happened. So what is there left to be afraid of? You won’t be happy forever, but you won’t be sad forever either. You know, it’s like a tipping point.

She struggled with this disease for a year, for five years, for twenty-five years. Bright shining girls who should be giggling with friends in the halls of high schools and colleges, studying Latin and microbiology and dance. Girls who should have been walking through fields of light and dark, who instead fell into a shadow. They died of heart attacks in bathrooms, in beds, in hospital rooms. They died at home, at school, alone. They died with their parents crying over them, their friends confused. They died before they had a chance to live, because once the demon moves in they’re not really living. I know. Believe me, I know.

Harriet Brown, Brave Girl Eating (via onedayshedecidedtolive)

(via peanutbutter-pretzels)

Nostalgia! I feel it even for someone who meant nothing to me, out of anxiety for the flight of time and a sickness bred of the mystery of life. If one of the faces I pass daily on the streets disappears, I feel sad; yet they meant nothing to me, other than being a symbol of all life.

You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light.

Nobody can save you but yourself. You will be put again and again into nearly impossible situations. They will attempt again and again through subterfuge, guise and force to make you submit, quit and/or die quietly inside. Nobody can save you but yourself and it will be easy enough to fail so very easily but don’t, don’t, don’t. Just watch them. Listen to them. Do you want to be like that? A faceless, mindless, heartless being? Do you want to experience death before death? Nobody can save you but yourself and you’re worth saving. It’s a war not easily won but if anything is worth winning then this is it. Think about it. Think about saving your self.

The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it’s treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.

The anxiety engendered by confronting the abyss of nothingness [of the loss of self] is more terrifying than the tortures of hell. In the vision of hell, I am punished and tortured—In the vision of nothingness I am driven to the border of madness—because I cannot say ‘I’ any more.

How does a human being who needs meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?

I do not want to pass the time. I want to grab hold of it and leave my mark upon the world.

The individual attempts to separate himself, to individuate, to affirm his autonomy, to go forward, to fulfill his potential. Yet there comes a time when he develops fear in the face of life. Individuation, emergence, or affirmation of specialness, are not duty-free: they entail a fearful, lonely sense of unprotectedness- a sense that the individual assuages by reversing direction: one goes “backward,” relinquishes individuation, finds comfort in fusing, in dissolving oneself, in giving oneself up to one another. Yet the comfort is unstable because this alternative evokes fear also- the fear of death: relinquishment, stagnation, and finally, inorganicity. Between these two poles of fear, life fear and death fear, the individual shuttles throughout life.

Many individuals have said in effect that “I so fear death that I am driven to suicide.” The idea of suicide offers some surcease from terror. It is an active act; it permits one to control that which controls one.