It was at this point, I think, that my life truly began to operate as though it were being lived on two trains, their tracks side by side. On one track, the train held the things of the “real world”—my academic schedule and responsibilities, my books, my connection to my family (whom so far I’d managed to convince, on a series of blessedly brief long-distance phone calls, that everything at Oxford was going just fine, thanks). On the other track: the increasingly confusing and even frightening inner workings of my mind. The struggle was to keep the trains parallel on their tracks, and not have
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