• And so on, until you arrive at the other side, among the purely abstract self-harming: the grinding over your failures, the refusal to remember anything good, the determination to ensure - if anyone falls into the mistake of making it clear they actually like you - that the next time round they change their opinion pronto. Emotional self-cannibalism, in other words, like those tessellated pictures of a person grappling with a mirror image of himself.

    Alexander Masters: And so on, until you arrive at the other side, among the purely abstract self-harming: the grinding over your failures, the refusal to remember anything good, the determination to ensure - if anyone falls into the mistake of making it clear they actually like you - that the next time round they change their opinion pronto. Emotional self-cannibalism, in other words, like those tessellated pictures of a person grappling with a mirror image of himself.
    Alexander Masters (2006). “Stuart: A Life Backwards”, Random House Digital, Inc.