I could not really concentrate on anything: I am usually a voracious summer reader, but that summer I couldn’t make it through a magazine. I started doing my laundry every night while I was awake, to keep busy and distracted. When I got a mosquito bite, I picked at it until it bled, then picked off the scabs; I bit my nails so far down that my fingers were always bleeding too; I had open wounds and scratches everywhere, though I never actually cut myself. My situation was so different from the vegetative symptoms that had constituted my breakdown that it did not occur to me that I was still in
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