I am afraid.
I am not solid, but hollow.
I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralyzed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness.
I never thought, I never wrote, I never suffered.
I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly into the womb.
I do not know who I am, where I am going—and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions.
I long for a noble escape from freedom—
I am weak, tired, in revolt from the strong constructive humanitarian faith which presupposes a healthy, active intellect and will.
There is no where to go—not home, where I would blubber and cry, a grotesque fool, into my mother's skirts—not to men where I want more than ever now the stern, final, paternal directive—not to church which is liberal, free—no, I turn wearily to the totalitarian dictatorship where I am absolved of all personal responsibility and can sacrifice myself in a "splurge of altruism" on the altar of the Cause with a capital "C."
~Sylvia Plath
