Dear Doctor: I am feeling very sick. I have a heart in my stomach which throbs and mocks. Suddenly the simple rituals of the day balk like a stubborn horse. It gets impossible to look people in the eye: corruption may break out again? Who knows. Small talk becomes desperate.
Hostility grows, too. That dangerous, deadly venom which comes from a sick heart. Sick mind, too. The image of identity we must daily fight to impress on the neutral, or hostile world, collapses inward; we feel crushed.
—Sylvia Plath, Journals, February 20, 1956
Aware of how little I was able to show my true self, I insisted that my name was not Donna any more and that I was to be called Lee … At home I would still spend hours in front of the mirror, staring into my own eyes and whispering my name over and over, sometimes trying to call myself back, at other times becoming frightened at losing my ability to feel myself.
—Donna Williams, Nobody Nowhere: The Remarkable Autobiography of an Autistic Girl
They had warned me that I was likely to fall into a depression: a high and then a low. The inevitable sequence of the cyclothyme, which was what I appeared to be. What they had not told me was that I would end up at such a distance from myself, such a hopeless distance.