Djuna Barnes's life was a living tragedy. She had everything - the talent, the audacity and most of all, heart and courage. She'd originated the New Journalism (where she'd put her own involvement in the subject - which is fundamentally more truthful, rather than pull off a Fredrik Knudsen and pretend to be objective), long before it calcified into a movement.

Her writings were a sort of solace and inspiration to me, though I never managed to connect emotionally with what it was she'd be writing about - like a moment from a distant bygone era that's covered with a haze. It was amazing how she could cycle through so many styles over her novels. "I can draw and write, and you'd be a fool not to hire me!" she boldly proclaimed to the Daily Eagle, applying herself to be one of their reporters.

Like me, she has a ravenous mind driven by an internal emotional resonance. And unlike me, she was able to successfully conduct love affairs with varying men and women, while I get to languish (poor little me, lol 😎).

One of those love affairs is with Thelma Wood, a sexually magnetic woman who'd frequented the bars in Berlin and drank excessively. Djuna's love with her lasted for eight years in the 1920s - it was a great and passionate love, with sex and drinking galore, but Thelma would frequently sleep with other women when Djuna just wanted Thelma alone. And with any heated relationship, it was bound to end in flames.

As in real life, the stories of people can get incredibly complicated with many things which are omitted from public knowledge. But when Thelma betrayed Djuna for one Henriette Alice McCrea-Metcalf, that was the breaking point.

The sheer pain Djuna Barnes was left with afterward had seared itself into her being, where she'd go into drinking spells and attempt to purge her traumatic betrayal by writing the novel Nightwood. Unfortunately, the book did not sell well, and her European publisher Faber only gave her a royalty of £43. Despondent with addiction and constant illness, and utterly reliant on her friend Peggy Guggenheim for financial support, Djuna attempted suicide around 1939, in a London hotel, and failed.

"That's it, I'm done with you and I'm cutting you off," Peggy went - furious that all her support for the ruined Bohemian had only resulted in her hospitalization. With no other choice, Djuna went back to her native New York.

Djuna's own family had attempted to intervene. Her mother, having stumbled upon Christian Science, would read to Djuna the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy (who once said that much of all physical/psychological ailments is just manifested fear, and it is knowing real love which is the solution). However, it didn't work, and she sent Djuna off to a sanitarium (yes, I know it's actually spelled sanatorium, but this is the title of nice horror game from the 1990s). And ultimately, Djuna was left furious - ostensibly at her own family, but really over her own failures stemming from herself. "There is no reason any longer why I should feel for them in any way but hate," she wrote to Emily Coleman, planning an autobiography of her family which would eventually come to fruition as the play 'The Antiphon.'

The fundamental problem becomes apparent when you look at the quote from one Emil Cioran: "If your hardships do not make you grow, and do not put you in a state of energetic euphoria, but rather depress and embitter you, know that you have no spiritual vocation." I took a bit of liberties, and though I proclaim not to be an expert on Djuna - who has time anyways to painstakingly pour over every handwritten letter, every quote, every factoid about her unless you're really that obsessed - I share her fundamental personality type, so in a way it is giving insight from the inside out.

But there is one vital difference between me and Djuna. During my own personal struggles with my own pain, memories, resentment and unbearable loneliness, where I'd seek people who'd have qualities I'd admire (if I were just as talented and appealing as them, maybe I'd be loved back in return and life would be worth living with love) - I've always found it in myself to open my heart to the spiritual, sensing somehow there is more than just the material world where time only flies forward, or even beyond the physical mind itself. Where I'd open myself to being surprised by a new facet of life I'd previously overlooked or didn't give much consideration to.

The actor William Fichtner, in his early 30s, had also thought himself a failure too - when he walked by a friend in New York who happened to be much more successful, and who didn't give Fichtner so much as a glance. He had to work as a waiter for a restaurant, but when his boss had fired him - Fitchner experienced the moment as a liberation. "Oh yes, now I don't have to worry about my piece of shit boss anymore, ruining my day."

This spiritual quality is absent in Djuna, who, even after giving up alcohol and publishing her play The Antiphon: "I wrote The Antiphon with clenched teeth," she said, "and I noted that my handwriting was as savage as a dagger." When her brother read the play, he accused Djuna of wanting "revenge for something long dead and to be forgotten." Barnes, in the margin of his letter, described her motive as "justice," and next to "dead" she inscribed, "not dead."

The pain had metastasized, and along with increasing arthritis, Djuna had confined herself to that small apartment room in Greenwich Village, 5 Patchin Place, for the last 41 years of her life, spending her day writing and re-writing poems - many of which would never be finalized, let alone published. She had willingly entombed herself along with her pain from the rest of the world, with other authors like Carson McCullers camping on her doorstep: "Whoever is ringing this bell, please go the hell away."

Even Anais Nin was not spared from Djuna's crustiness, who Djuna would cross the street just to avoid her, and who drew more of Djuna's ire when she named a character Djuna in homage.

By the time Djuna Barnes died in 1982, she was 90 years old. Blade Runner would come out in theatres a few days later after her death. The world which Djuna had once thrived upon from the early 1900s, and which had given her so much joy, love and ultimately suffering - it was long gone, kept alive only as a relic of her mind which left her with no hope for anything else out of life.

If you had the choice to let go of suffering over what you happened to live through, would you take it? From experience, it's not really a choice one would really make, like how you can't choose whether to be hopeful or scornful over the prospect of human immortality - or choose who you fall in love with. Because it's who you fundamentally are as a soul. There are people in life who, like Djuna, are left embittered when life's trials bring them face to face with their own suffering and resulting misery - and no matter what, you cannot argue, reason or ever convince them to open themselves back up to life. Once you allow hate to thrive in your heart, your heart begins to die, and life is over when your heart dies.