I felt despair

I felt despair.  The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously.  For me it denotes a single admixture – a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death.  It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst.  But it’s not these things, quite.  It’s more like wanting do die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.

~ David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments, 1997.