I arrived in Chicago on December 31, an hour before the new year. I was met by my uncle and proceeded to his house with him. He is a vegetarian, a raw food one, an ardent and unmerciful propagandist; his wife a chronic invalid, cold and lifeless. There was really no room for me, and I slept in an unheated room, where they kept fruit and vegetables. It was cold, too cold to dress in without great discomfort, but uncle said the air was good for me, and the fruit had to be taken care of anyway. Now I am generally open to reason and persuasion, even if I do act on my own impulses and ideas eventually. But I will not be forced. I have fled from one refuge to another in the hope of being free, of being able to be myself, and uncle’s insistence on my not doing this and that, resulted in argument, but no open break. The result was that everything seemed to fall from under my feet, and on January 10th, I made up my mind to commit suicide on my twenty-third birthday, May 10th, next. Of course, this was not the result entirely, or even principally, of my trouble with uncle. That was only important insofar as it added the last straw to my .... misunderstood and, if not persecuted, at least worried beyond endurance, by my relatives. My reasons, in a few words, for deciding on suicide were: (1) Disillusionment. What had sustained me through the mental and nervous shocks, sleepless nights, ecstasies, and despair of the years, since my sixteenth (although it began before that) was the thought, which I dare not acknowledge to myself, much less express to others, that I was, if not a genius, at least a talented man, with the ability to do big things. Sometimes business success appealed to me; at other times, science or philosophy--mental and intellectual pre-eminence; then artistic effort, vaguely the idea of being an author, dramatist or literary and social reform leader. Up to the day I left Cuba, despite reactions and pitiful weakness, I kept my faith in myself, in my mission. Reading Ibsen only served to confirm it. In .... I still had it. I lost it in .... to a great extent. After I had purchased a typewriter and sat down to work, my courage failed; I could do nothing. Reading Bernard Shaw showed me that much that I had thought to be artistic temperament, ideals, sentiment, was plain romantic illusion, and I did not feel that I was called upon then to sacrifice myself for humanity, without the esthetic pleasure my illusions had given me. Before this I had unwittingly cloaked my own desires and passions under the guise of doing something worth while, of uplifting and what not. Curiously enough, all my ambition, ideas, etc., returned on further reading of Shaw in Chicago, after I had started going on the assumption of suicide on May 10th. I took them back, with the idea that now I was through with romantic illusion and prepared to face reality. Before recurring to this, I shall go on to the other suicide reasons.