Effort

He knew that this feeling would pass, as it always did, and he'd look back on this time and laugh at his paranoia. But he desperately wanted to hold on to this feeling, as insane as he knew it was, and even knowing there was no way he could maintain the feeling. It was insanity, but it was his -- and at the moment, he preferred to live in misery having something, even something as nauseating as insanity, than live in the world that others accepted, and which he had nothing.