"After two days of no-schedule, I sit down on a clear cold sunny day with nothing to beef at except the slick sick feeling which won't leave. It comes and goes. I feel I could crack open mines of life- in my daily writing sketches, in my reading and planning: if only I could get rid of my absolutist panic. I have, continually, the sense that this time is invaluable, and the opposite sense that I am paralyzed to use it: or will use it wastefully and blindly. I have all the world's readings on my back, instead of a possible book a day. I must discipline myself to concentrate on certain authors, certain fields, lest I welter, knowing nothing and everything. I am neither a know-nothing or a bohemian, but I find myself wishing, wishing, to have a corner of my own: something I can know about, write about well. All I have ever read thins and vanishes: I do not amass, remember. I shall this year work for steady small growth, nothing spectacular, and the ridding of this panic.
"Brief note: to self. Time to take myself in hand. I have been staggering about lugubrious, black, bleak, sick. Now to build into myself, to give myself backbone., how ever much I fail. If I get through this year, no matter how badly, it will be the biggest victory I've ever done. All my spoiled little girl selves cry to escape before my bad, ignorant somnolence is made drearily public... If I fainted, or paralyzed myself, or pleaded that I couldn't carry on, I'd probably escape: but how to face myself, to live after that? To write or be intelligent as a woman? It could be a worse trauma than this, although escape looks very sweet and plausible. This way, I can build up a dull, angry resentment & feel I'm going through with it & will deserve my freedom in June, for sacrificing a year of my life. 7 more months.
From "Journals of Sylvia Plath". Maybe some of you can relate too, for I can.