In my experience, psychological harm is always caused by excess, or duration.
A surfeit of winter; spending too long being unable to separate one pertient thought from the morass of hundreds of intrusive, irrelevant ones.
The incessant impact of winter on disposition; eating through to the bone for longer than I can stand, poisoning every action with its clear, crisp killing mechanism. A poor sniper, the cold incapacitates you, without ever injuring you enough to bring about the end.
Too much winter, for longer than I am able to tolerate - this is the way back to the old self, silent, inarticulate and forever holding my head in my hands lest the gods of misery issue out through the ears which have heard it all before.
The old self, familiar in its blandness, at once understimulated and overstimulated. Complaining about lack of company, and despairing about the glut of information which competes for attention from every possible outlet.
The hiss of overinformation leads to the echo of my own breathing. I reject it as the mountain rejects its avalanche. Yet stripped of it, society expects that I fit into its norms, its categories. The first appalls me, the other ejects me from its midst.
I can't talk about the television, or makes of car, or the tardiness of the rescue mission in Haiti, or which singer's fucking which other singer. It all dissolves into meaninglessness, and I expel it from me like the convalescent ridding himself of a virus.
It seems that I must settle for the flatness of nothing, where not even a molecule of air stirs in the silence, or enough competing distractions to split my mind apart. I want neither, and this is why I am the way I am.
