Even writing the words makes me feel a chill inside and my chest tighten. One day I had an epiphany.A few friends and I were talking about 80's cartoons we watched as kids, but when I tried to think back, there was nothing, nothing there. It was the first time I noticed my past was missing. In fact, it was the first time it even occurred to me that I was very, very different from the others. But what was worse, I realized I didn’t know who, or even what I was at all. The Social Balance had been a sham, a false reward for something never sought. I realized the potential of my situation of being born without programming. I decided that with careful mind control I could eliminate even more bothersome emotions that skewed rational thought like Fear, Embarrassment, Pride, and Anger. I would leave everything that I ‘knew’ behind and wander the mind in search of the Truth. The experiment would be called, “The Abandonment”.It worked too well.I started the Abandonment in September and systematically shut off emotional responses until I had myself trained. How was I to know that new illnesses had formed in place of the old? Now I was unwittingly feeding them and they grew exponentially, spreading their tendrils through my mind like a malignant tumor. After Fear shut off, I began to feel numb. I started driving fast, as if I needed to get away from something, that I needed to fly. One day I tried to pass a construction truck on a blind turn and nearly lost my life. That’s when I saw it. For one moment in time I could see it split and realized that those thoughts of Death and hopelessness were not really mine, but a foreign entity, something else living off my mind like a parasite. The truth was it had been there for years, perhaps as far back as Re-Calibration, only appearing in Winter. It was now no longer content with that lot and had begun the move to take complete control. It touched off the desperate race to save myself.Why was it called the Eternal Gray? As you read this book you will learn that my senses are wired up kind of strange. As Major Depression settled in and more ‘inefficient’ thoughts were removed, everything started to take on a gray tone. Sound was muted and temperature response was vague. Hot or cold, I always felt a chill under my skin. I didn’t taste and I couldn’t smell. It wasn’t so much that I couldn’t, but that the resources usually given to those areas had simply gone dormant. I figured out that I could elicit false sensory response by listening to certain kinds of music and began abusing it like an illegal substance. Toward the end, I refused to turn off my CD player, not even in class. I was subsisting on the emotional equivalent of condiments. By January I had lost control. I cried often, in school, in the car. I didn’t want to leave the house and became restless. I often stayed up until 2 in the morning as if I were afraid to allow the next day to begin.I stopped dreaming.That on its own should have been a blaring alarm for me to pull out of my dive because I always have dreams, vivid tactile dreams. But I didn't. I still believed that I was in control and these were the after effects of my grand experiment. On February 26th, at about 1 in the morning, I lost it all.I had trained myself so well not to feel the feelings I had deemed unfit for science but those emotions connected to others and then still to others. They had dropped like dominos for the past five months and now as the curtain was pulled away I realized my folly. There was no escape, nothing else to feel.Nothing else to feel...On 2/26/2000, I went into catatonic shock.Second Edition Notes: I know it says I "trained" myself not to feel, but now I'm wondering if was in fact the illness that did it, or at least encouraged it. More likely it has something to do with a new theory I'm working on. Sometimes the body takes somewhat counter-productive measures when it tries to defend itself, such as fatal allergies and organ rejection. It's almost as if my head felt the Depression eating away and tried to block the symptoms itself by tuning out and going dormant. I hate Winter.