I spent a great deal of time inside myself, as if in my own world, screened off from everything else. But there was no world there inside me, only a kind of nothing layer, a neither-nor, a state of being hollow without being empty or filled without being full. It just was, inside myself. This emptiness and the emptiness was inside me – no more than that. It was nothing but an extension of time – I was in that state and it just went on. But the sense of unreality and of always being wrong when I was out in the world, outside myself, was harder to bear.

I often sat in the garden, looking at something, absorbed in a flower or a leaf. Then I felt neither wrong nor right, I just was and that never stopped. I never suddenly wanted to do something else. Nothing was happening there inside me. I sat looking observing.

I had no problem dealing with failing at something that I had decided to do on my own. I simply tried again until it worked. When I had set the goal myself, my patience was infinite. But when other people demanded something of me, I found it difficult that I failed so often. And every time it happened, I became even more sensitive and felt I was one great failure.

In "Gold - proficiency"