“You’re not a monster,” I said. But I lied. What I really wanted to say was that a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.

Ocean Vuong, from “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous”

In the course of ordinary self experience I lose grasp of my thoughts, am interrupted by forgetting, frustrated by my failure to find a word for itself, stopped in the effort to think a thought that refuses as yet to come into cognition. In the background of my mind are glimmers of images and words, unheeded in consciousness as I concentrate on other matters—discarded mental contents that seem to slide into darkness. That nothingness is always there, whether it momentarily mutes speech, swallows up memory, refuses to yield an idea struggling to come into thought, or receives all the faint and discarded images and words that pass by in the back of my mind on an endless conveyor belt, from the unconscious passing briefly through consciousness to oblivion.

Christopher Bollas, Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience