The passage from The Bell Jar

"I had locked myself in the bathroom, and run a tub full of warm water, and taken out a Gillete blade.
When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tub and seeing redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank to sleep under a surf gaudy as poppies.
But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, a whole lot harder to get at.
It would take two motions. One wrist, then the other wrist. Three motions if you counted changing the razor from hand to hand. Then I would step in the tub and lie down.
I moved in front of the medicine cabinet. If I looked in the mirror while I did it, it would be like watching somebody else, in a book or a play.
But the person in the mirror was paralyzed and too stupid to do a thing.
Then I thought maybe I ought to spill a little blood first for practice, so I sat on the edge of the tub and crossed my right ankle over my left knee. Then I lifted my right hand with the razor and let it drop on its own weight, like a guillotine, onto the calf of my leg.
I felt nothing. Then I felt a small, deep thrill, and a bright seam of red welled up at the lip of the slash. The blood gathered darkly, like fruit, and rolled down my ankle into the cup of my black patent leather shoe.
I thought of getting into the tub then, but I realized my dallying had used up a better part of the morning, and that my mother would probably come home and find me before I was done.
So I bandaged the cut and packed up my Gillete blades."

This passage from The Bell Jar is a nonfiction passage by Sylvia Plath. It's amazing to see how a person who died over forty years ago could ever have gone through the same things as me. After reading this, I don't think I ever want to cut again....