Psychologists call it "free-floating" anxiety. What contradictory words. Anxiety doesn't free-float. It stalks. It attacks. It lands on you with a thud.

I would never kill myself intentionally. I couldn't do that to my family, my friends ... But to have fate step in and give me a shove, that's a different matter. Then I have the exit, without the guilt. I am ashamed of myself for thinking like this. But more than anything, I am frightened that it makes me feel so much better to think about it. Sometimes it eases the terror, the sense that I am condemned eternally to this hell.

In these flashes of insight, I understand for a moment that one of the great dividends of darkness is an increased sensitivity to the light.

I always feel bad laughing at people who act crazy. But sometimes the things they do are so damned funny. I wonder what I'd look like if I slipped a few notches on the mental-health index.

Sometimes hell has no words.

The bottom line is that my life has already almost slipped away from me. I have two choices: I can end it or I can fight like hell to save it.

People say, "I have heart disease," not "I am heart disease." Somehow the presumption of a person's individuality is not compromised by those diagnostic labels. All the labels tell us is that the person has a specific challenge with which he or she struggles in a highly diverse life. But call someone "a schizophrenic" or "a borderline" and the shorthand has a way of closing the chapter on the person. It reduces a multifaceted human being to a diagnosis and lulls us into a false sense that those words tell us who the person is, rather than only telling us how the person suffers.