My mother must have bathed me hundreds of times. But it's my father rinsing me off with the purple metal cup that I remember most clearly. The suffus… - Alison Bechdel

And woe betide the person with the 'double abnormality' of a false self and 'a fine intellect' that they find they can use to escape their pain.

'The world may observe academic success of a high degree, and may find it hard to believe in the very real distress of the individual concerned, who feels 'phoney' the more he or she is successful. [as quoted by Winnicott]

...did that require such a leap of the imagination? Perhaps affectation can be so thoroughgoing, so authentic in its details, that it stops being pretense… and becomes, for all practical purposes, real.

Our games of baseball — already lethargic affairs — would grind to a half as soon as the ball rolled near a perennial border.