The Blog of the “Anonymous Patient” is designed to ask you, the reader, to act as the author’s therapist. Each entry is an honest depiction of the author’s state of mind and emotion. What would you advise him to do?

I Simply Can’t Move.

A horrible lethargy has overwhelmed me. I have so many things to do, so many people I need to follow up with and satisfy, yet I cannot presently get out of my own way.

I’m not sure what’s causing it. My friend died recently. That has changed me I feel. I’m not sure why or how but it has and I’d like to understand how it has affected how I feel.

I find I can’t even see well anymore. And this is not just about glasses. Truth to tell nothing feels right. Nothing feels normal or real or proper. Everything feels put upon, imperfect, facile and false. I don’t feel real or alive or like anything I’ve come to know as me.

And I’m horribly unsatisfied.

But why? Things are not going appreciably badly. In fact, by some arguments things for me are going well. Yet perhaps that’s the problem. Suddenly things are going better and I’m suddenly faced with having to make them continue to be so and to improve them. There’s nothing like getting opportunity and finding yourself stone cold unable to act on it. I’m terribly afraid I think, afraid, alone and ill defined.

I’m a blank slate, a tabula rasa.

I can do a lot. I have many talents and abilities. My mother always told me that I had to choose. It made sense but I never could. I ask how can anyone choose amongst one’s own talents? How can one give anything up? I could do so many things well that it made me feel like a God among men. Not really, but it made me feel special. To choose seemed always a way to feel less so, to be normal.

And perhaps that was it. Normal life offered me little. My parents fought, I had few friends and I didn’t like myself. Normalcy had nothing but facing up to all that. And that meant seemingly something far more sinister than I wanted to face.

For facing it meant realizing how much I was missing, how much, perhaps at this point in my life, I’ve missed. Yet even that would be all right if I didn’t feel that the edge of reality was really a knife. I fear that the real world is one I would want to die to get away from. I fear that I have no life in reality, no life I would want. I won’t want to make the effort to be already that dead.

Tell me I’m wrong. Please. I really need to know this. Tell me there is life to life. Tell me if I just live my life I’ll be able to live my life. Tell me if I finally let go of the fantasy, of the everything that I’ve been holding on to it will be all right. I can’t see it. Maybe I see a little something but it’s behind so much crazy anger and seemingly insane behavior that I can hardly believe it actually exists.

I need help.