Asylum Piece

And through all this one is expected to carry on one’s personal existence as usual; to work and to perform social and family duties as if the background of one’s life were still perfectly normal: that is what is hardest of all to bear. Naturally one gets nervy and irritable and absent-minded; one’s friends gradually start to avoid one; one’s work suffers, and then one’s health begins to break down. One loses sleep, it becomes harder amd harder to take any interest in conversation, books, music, plays, eating and drinking, love-making, even in one’s personal appearance. Ultimately one becomes completely cut off from reality, alone in a world in which there is nothing to do but wait, day after day, for some fate at which one can only guess but which, in any case, can scarcely be less tolerable than the preceding uncertainty.