page 221 - corpus

... to reside in a twilight world, to never quite have the energy for eating, or reading, or talking, for days on end. I remembered the way you begin to look upon your body in the third person- it's an object, out there, with which you're fascinated, transfixed. You treat yourself as if you were a wounded bird, listening to your own breathing, stroking your feathers, taking your pulse hourly. A kind of fetishism occurs in which your whole life is gathered into your body and the obsessional contemplation of it; your symptoms absorb you utterly, screening out the robust emotions and appetites of the well.