…And sometimes I glimpse the landscapes of a much more normal life through the barred asylum windows. It looks like an equally god-awful place to the world of global catastrophes. To lift an image from Terry Pratchett’s Sto Latt: a dank plain of endless cabbage fields where I would have to confront my aimless, friendless, joyless existence; the abandonment of all my age-eroded aspirations.
This is the other fear of recovery: to find yourself standing alone in a kitchen at midnight, forlorn – all that effort, the life or death struggle, the project, the constant cultivation of it, leading only to this: bereft, middle-aged, pointless, pot-bellied, balding and hairy. Nothing left to do.
Yup: the return of exhausted dejection and ennui.
Middle-aged Male Anorexic 