‘Am I really me?’ I wondered. ‘Am I really a person?’ For a second or two I can’t even seem to make sense of the question that I am attempting to ask myself here. I know there is activity going on in my mind but I have no idea as to what it means. I’m trying to get my mind to do something but I’m not sure what it is. I’m making mental activity happen but that activity is meaningless to me. The activity I have caused to occur in my mind alienates me all the more. ‘I’m happy,’ I tell myself, ‘I’m having a good time’… I don’t know what these words mean though. I know it’s important for me to say them but I don’t know what they mean.

I didn’t used to be like this, I know that much! Things used to be different for me, things used to be better than this. Things used to be good. It is no comfort for me to know this of course, no comfort at all. ‘How did things go so wrong?’ I asked myself. ‘However did things go so wrong?’ I used to be a person, I used to have a life, I tell myself. ‘Hands up everyone who used to have a life,’ the group facilitator asks, looking around the room with an engaging smile on his face. At least, I imagine that it’s meant to be engaging. I can only assume that it is.

Hands up everyone who used to have a life, hands up everyone who used to have a life. I don’t trust it though; I keep thinking that this must be some kind of trick. Some kind of cruel trick. I’m the only person in the room – I’m trapped in a bubble made up of my own aggressive projections. I am aggressing myself. I am expressing hostility towards myself but I’m not admitting to it! I have created a hostile environment for myself. ‘Hands up everyone who used to have a life,’ the group facilitator asks, looking around the room. He has an engaging smile on his face. ‘Hands up, hands up, hands up…’ I sit there without moving, staring sullenly into the middle distance. I’m not playing ball.

I used to be happier than this, I realised. I used to have an actual personality. It wasn’t a very nice one, but at least it was something. I used to have friends, even though none of them liked me. I used to hang out with them on occaison. ‘This is body reshaping at its best,’ screamed the advert from the nearby speaker, ‘Why don’t you drop into your local clinic for a quote?’ ‘I’ve gone a bit too far for that now,’ I remarked to myself conversationally, after a moment or two. I’m in a grubby little fast food restaurant, sitting alone at a dingy-looking table. There is no one else here but me. The whole place is an eloquent expression of my own repressed hostility towards myself. The hostility is everywhere. Even the food that I’m sitting here eating is saturated with it. Especially the food that I’m sitting here eating is saturated with it!

Do you know that thing where you know that you’ve got no one to blame for your situation but yourself, and that just makes you hate yourself all the more? No one to blame but yourself, no one to blame but yourself. Your situation is bleak beyond all comparison, and you’ve got no one to blame for it but yourself. No one to blame but yourself and your terrible terrible hostility. Passive though it may be. No one else to blame in the whole wide world but yourself and that’s why you have created the hostile environment for yourself. Because it’s only what you deserve. So you’re sitting there in the hostile environment that you’ve created and the pain and desolation you feel only goes to make you hate yourself all the more. You know the situation I’m talking about, I presume? I mean, we’ve all been there, am I right? Isn’t that the place we all keep coming back to, sooner or later?