I scrabbled around and did find some fancy words approximating how I feel right now, so here goes -

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The worst was waking up in the middle of the night, feeling asphyxiated, somehow, by the air that had congealed in this hard, nauseating crust around him. He badly wanted to be somewhere else, in place of different choices. He wanted to be someone else, in a body of different knowledges.

He was at that peculiar stage where the forked roads up till then had locked him onto a particular path, and a growing sense of knowing certainty served to cushion him somewhat from the perturbations of alternative possibility. But he was, at present, briefly inhabiting the antechamber of doubt and anticipation. There were two choices before him here, after the passing of imperious youth – disappointment at the irreversibility of life’s dramatic shrinkage, tempered with a peaceable fatalism that is one of age’s rare graces to mankind, or the impenetrable, self-satisfied, respectable middle-agedness that is man’s own cultivated shield to protect modernity’s last sacrament – sanity.

But he wanted neither fatalism nor sanity. He was in search of joy, the deep red joy that bloomed and flamed, the deep red joy that his mind was able to conjure, but somehow eternally out of his reach. He still laboured under the conviction that such joy could only come from a genuine – not blind, not dogged – belief in the sanctity and goodness of his choices, and yet, it was so terribly exhausting to daily fight off the threat of the trite. These days, it was too much effort to hope.