Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.

This is not a matter of virtue-it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.

life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.

I am not what you see and hear.

I find in myself a need to get very away.

That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack. That concentrating on anything is very hard work.

Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T true is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it.