Sometimes I feel like all I am is a fraying patchwork of unsustainable and untenable coping mechanisms and defense mechanisms. Is there even anything left underneath? a tiny, atrophied child? It\'s so easy, and perhaps also inviting, to feel so hopeless.

One of the worst things about depression is how weak it makes you feel. It convinces you that you\'re pathetic for struggling when everyone else seems to just get on with life (and by extension you feel selfish, ashamed, alone).

Rationally I know that I must have some strength to face the days of despair, sorrow, hopelessness and apathy. To even sometimes fight back. But surviving isn\'t the same thing as living.

Sometimes I feel like I am fooling people, presenting a shell and hiding myself. Sometimes I feel like a liar, or a monster.

I bought a copy of All Quiet On The Western Front years ago but I only got around to reading it recently. I found that I could relate to quite a few sections. It\'s hard not to feel slightly ashamed of that, I do not pretend to know what it is like to be a soldier at war. I forgot to mark most of them and don\'t feel like finding them now, but here is one.

Life here on the very edges of death follows a terribly clear line, it restricts itself to what is absolutely necessary, everything else is part of a dull sleep – it is our crudeness but also our salvation. If we were to make finer distinctions we would long since have gone mad, deserted or been killed. It is like a Polar expedition – every activity is geared exclusively towards survival, and is automatically directed to that end. Nothing else is permissible, because it would use up energy unnecessarily. That is the only way we can save ourselves, and I often look at myself and see a stranger, when in quiet hours the puzzling reflection of earlier times places the outlines of my present existence outside me, like a dull mirror image; and then I am amazed at how that nameless active force that we call life has adapted itself to all this. Everything else is in suspended animation and life is constantly on guard against the threat of death. It has made us into thinking animals so that we can have instinct as a weapon. It has blunted our sensitivities, so that we don\'t go to pieces in the face of a terror that would demolish us if we were thinking clearly and consciously. It has awakened in us a sense of comradeship to help us escape from the abyss of isolation. It has given us the indifference of wild animals, so that in spite of everything we can draw out the positive side from every moment and store it up as a reserve against the onslaught of oblivion. And so we live out a closed, hard existence of extreme superficiality, and it is only rarely that an experience sparks something off. But when that happens, a flame of heavy and terrible longing suddenly bursts through.

Those are the dangerous moments, the ones that show us that the way we have adapted is really artificial after all, that it isn\'t simple calmness, but rather a desperate struggle to attain calmness. In our way of life we are barely distinguishable from bushmen as far as the externals are concerned; but while bushmen can always be that way because that is the way they are, and they can at least develop their capacities by their own efforts, with us it is exactly the other way about: our inner forces are not geared to development, but to regression. The attitude of the bushmen is relaxed, as it should be; ours is completely tense and artificial.

And in the night you realize, when you wake out of a dream, overcome and captivated by the enchantment of visions that crowd in on each other, just how fragile a handhold, how tenuous a boundary seperates us from darkness – we are little flames, inadaquately sheltered by thin walls from the tempest of dissolution and insensibility in which we flicker and are often all but extinguished. Then the muted roar of battle surrounds us, and we creep into ourselves and stare wide-eyed into the night.

The narrator also speaks of disconnection when he returns home on leave. It is this disconnection, and the numbness and defense mechanisms, that I relate to. I\'ve felt like this for so long (or so it seems) that I cannot tell you when it began or why.

I am determined to feel alive.