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.

It's enough just to speak when spoken to, to give some minimal reaction to a stimulus. But to actually be the stimulus doesn't even occur to me.

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.

Sometimes hell has no words.

If only I had known a year ago what I'd be facing now. Until last year I lived with the innocent arrogance that my life was a simple product of effort, will, and design. But now I am a house of cards, held precariously by the fragile conspiracy of wind, weight, and angle. Perhaps it is best we cannot see into our futures.

I'm getting less good at faking it. People in my family are noticing and asking what's wrong. My friends give me invitations to talk, to cry. I love them for their caring, but I want to run from it. I have lost their language, their facility with words that convey feelings. I am in new territory and feel like a foreigner in theirs.

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.