I often feel that I have nothing to do with normality, that all around me there are enemies; that I am no longer myself, but have become someone else; even that I am sexless – neither female nor male. This is exactly like the person in the American film The Looking Glass, who stands for ages in front of the bathroom mirror, whose bright surface the steam has covered over with a layer of mist. Though the window is tightly closed, a soft breeze still finds its way into the room, swaying the shower curtain, so that it covers the private parts of the person before the mirror. The person has chosen to stay in the bathroom out of self-love, mind and body having been too long exposed to the filthy world outside.

There are invisible eyes lurking everywhere in the air, malevolently watching this person.

You don't know the person's sex because the person doesn't want you to know.

I often think that I am that person in the mirror. Clearly, it is from my image in the mirror that I recognize myself, a combination of analytical observer and one who is analytically observed, a person whose sexuality has, as the result of a variety of outside factors, been obscured or neglected, a sexless person. Through its intriguing allure, this image has the possibility of developing in any number of ways. As soon as I look at typical phenomena of the external world, they are distorted, altered. It seems that everything is an illusion.

Even though a lot of religious or philosophical works, eastern or western, have taught me that if I want to escape ignorance and gain enlightenment, I must go through this feeling of personal alienation. I worry all the same that someday I may lose control over this separation of mind and body and go mad.

This morning, with the light piercing my eyes like slivers of glass, I focus all my attention on the ink blot on my pillow, probably the result of carelessness when I was doodling on a sheet of paper.