A personal essay often includes some or a lot of personal confession. That makes the reader feel less lonely in their confusion and darkness.

Indeed, at times it's best to shut up.

I've had an enduring appreciation of psychology.

Domesticity has been a challenge for me but painful as it's been, engaging with family has been a school for reducing solipsism and increasing my understanding of people's different reactions to stress.

I am apt to be harsh in my secret judgments of others, seeing them as defective because they are not enough like me.

... I vowed that I would always respect the right of an individual to kill himself. Whether suicide was a moral or immoral act I no longer felt sure, but of the dignity of its intransigence I was convinced.

I imagined a psychic pain growing inside him (myself) that demanded some physical outlet. Suicide must have been his attempt to give Pain a body, a representation, to put it outside himself. A need to convert inner torment into some outward tangible wound that all could see. It was almost as though suicide were a last-ditch effort at exorcism, in which the person sacrificed his life in order that the devil inside might die.