Although I was back in good standing, I grew somewhat quiet and withdrawn—“in myself,” as I came to call it when it had become much more extreme. Unless spoken to, I didn’t have much to say; I wasn’t sure I even deserved to be heard. I’d started to believe (or, perhaps more correctly, feel ), that speaking was actually “bad.” At one point, after I’d been asked to make a brief presentation and did so, a staff member remarked that I had spoken more in those few minutes than I had in months. Perhaps this was the beginning of my estrangement from the world, the very first inkling of my illness,
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