Oblivion can be so tempting. Suicides know it, addicts know it. I've laid myself down at the lip of that chasm and peered over, wondering how it would feel to fall. Wondering if I was far up enough to die before I'd even feel the landing.

This is not the edge of the breakdown,

I wrote back in the day, during the earplug phase when I battled for my life and sanity. 

this is the breakdown itself. 

I was going to make a longer piece out of it, a kind of rant-poem. But no, it didn't work out that way. Too busy keeping body and soul together to write. 

I wanted the breakdown, the way Eleanor Vance wanted Hill House in Shirley Jackson's fantastic 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House (which you must read). Eleanor wanted to be taken by the house because she had nowhere else to go, and she wanted a home. 

I wanted the breakdown because then, if I let myself go, at least I wouldn't have to fight it anymore. Funny––I've written characters like that, too.