My heart and my face feel like stone. Even though I didn't leave the apartment for two days, until I needed food this morning and made the briefest of trips, I do not feel as if I am isolating.

In 2003, I lost everything and wandered in confusion and mental disarray for much of 2003 and 2004.

After I started working part-time at the community college, I felt as if I was becoming accepted, even liked by a few people, respected and doing good things for my students. Being rejected for the full-time job, whilst seeing how young white males are preferred in a system of unprovable bias -- and being told that I am not really seeing what I see -- I feel as if I was kicked in the heart all over again.

I look at people in the stores and on the street, and my first thought is: How will this person hurt me.

A heart should be open, soft, squishy, loving. I know that, and I have read almost every positive thinking and cognitive therapy book that's important, and been with various Ts for years and years, and I don't even care very much that my heart is stone.

My mother says I have a bad attitude. I do not see any difference in outward effects of having a positive attitude and a bad attitude. But at least a bad attitude expresses the way I feel, so that I am cranky, short-tempered, defensive and mean, and keeps people away.