Being human is a raw experience. I have bouts of not feeling fully human. It’s always connected to a horrible sensation of being very distant from my body, like I’m disintegrating. I feel like this today. I think it is the result of too much time alone in thought and on the internet this weekend. I look on my body’s workings numbly, from a great distance, as though through the wrong end of a telescope. My hand resting on the mouse is a heavy foreign instrument. When I walk around town, I feel very far from everything and everyone. People’s voices, including my own when I speak, come at me down a funnel. It’s hard to get work done in such a state. It takes great effort to appear coordinated.

I slipped and fell and gashed my shin open the other day. It felt so good, the sting and the blood oozing out, like proof of real contact with something outside myself. I noticed that I felt more alive than in weeks, as if I had been pulled back into my body at the moment of impact.

14 April, 2009