Every day, a mental cleansing takes place inside my head in three stages.

 Every day, a mental cleansing takes place inside my head to preserve my purity. The first stage of forgetting occurs the moment I withdraw from the environment and return to my solitude. When this happens, most of my experiences are turned away at the threshold and never enter long-term memory, so there’s nothing left to remember. But since this process demands monumental inner fuel, a part of my mind’s attention lingers on the events of the day. The second stage of forgetting happens when the day ends and I go to bed; by the time morning comes and I rise from sleep, the reason I can begin a “new and fresh” day is precisely because yesterday has been erased. The third process of forgetting is not really “forgetting” at all, but a mechanism of emotional decay. That is: if I’m in a particularly negative state, I express my feelings about it only when conditions are “safe”—never while I’m still in it, always after it has passed. I don’t suppress my emotions; I simply send them off to later dates, as if I couldn’t deal with them now. But what if those dates never arrive? A lifelong postponement...