I was in a hurry to do the happy things, the things that always used to make me happy before. They always made me happy before so I knew they would make me happy again! That’s why I wanted to do them. ‘Do the happy things, do the happy things, do the happy things’ I told myself earnestly, but I was like a broken robot. I couldn’t obey my own instructions – my programming was banjaxed and it was worse I was getting not better. There was no light at the end of the tunnel I found myelf in. My vicious and uncompromising search for happiness had turned me into a damaged machine that was tearing itself to pieces and no one wanted to see that. People could smell my desperation – my affliction was right out there in the open for everyone to witness…

The next thing was that I was getting angry with myself because I was so conspicuously failing to be happy. I had let myself down and that was unforgivable – I could never forgive myself that. Of all the sins, is this not the worst? I had failed to be happy and of all the failures to which we are prone is this not the most terrible of all? I was angry and I was frustrated. ‘Be happy, be happy, be happy…’ I roared at myself at the top of my voice but I knew that I was only being a dysfunctional mechanism, maiming myself all the more in my terrible need to succeed and be happy. I was a maimed thing, a broken unhappy thing, and everything I did only served to underline that. My own desperate attempts to rectify my situation had become a living hell that I could not escape from. No one wants to know that when you tell them.

‘You failed to be happy, you failed to be happy, you failed to be happy, you failed to be happy,’ I screamed venomously at myself. I wasn’t going to let myself forget it. There really would be no forgiveness for me this time – I had burned all my bridges now and no mistake. I had put myself beyond the pale. Some failures are just too big to overlook and the failure to be happy was surely one of those. I was like a broken robot at this stage, desperately searching for new and improved ways of hurting myself, new and improved ways of making my existence a living hell. No punishment was too cruel for me, no insult too vile. I was determined to make myself pay…

I have become the leaden homunculus. I have become the self-biter – the one who tears his own flesh asunder. Every remedy I hit upon turns into a curse. With every move I make, I magnify my own pain. With every action I take I create new worlds of suffering for myself, each one a hundred times worse than the one which preceded it. Seeing my own self-destructive folly unfold in this way only serves to make me more enraged at myself – the hatred I feel towards myself for visiting this hell upon me feeds voraciously upon itself and grows a thousand snake-heads, each one bristling with fangs that ooze venom, each one a fully-fledged monster in its own right…