Greta’s Reviews > American Psycho > Status Update

life played out as a sitcom, a blank canvas that reconfigures itself into a soap opera. It's an isolation ward that serves only to expose my own severely impaired capacity to feel. I am at its center, out of season, and no one ever asks me for any identification.

‘…lost in my own private maze…’

‘…and when she sees me, standing over her, naked, I can imagine that my virtual absence of humanity fills her with mind-bending horror.’

There wasn't a clear, identifiable emotion within me, <..>. I had all the characteristics of a human being flesh, blood, skin, hair-but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that the normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposetul erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning.

‘Life remained a blank canvas, a cliché, a soap opera. I felt lethal, on the verge of frenzy. My nightly bloodlust overflowed into my days and I had to leave the city. My mask of sanity was a victim of impeding slippage. This was the bone season for me and I needed a vacation.’

‘And though it has been in no way a romantic evening, she embraces me and this time emanates a warmth I’m not familiar with. I am so used to imagining everything happening the way it occurs in movies, visualizing things falling somehow into shape of events on a screen, that I almost hear the swelling of an orchestra can almost hallucinate the camera panning low around us, fireworks bursting in slow motion…’

‘A curtain of stars, miles of them, are scattered, glowing, across the sky and their multitude humbles me, which I have a hard time tolerating’

‘Since it’s impossible in the world we live in to empathize with others, we can always empathize with ourselves’