The best thing about rock bottom is the rock part. You discover the solid bit of you. The bit that can't be broken down further. The thing that you might sentimentally call a soul. At our lowest we find the solid ground of our foundation. And we can build ourselves anew.

Maybe looking at a specific part or chemical in the brain is only ever going to give a partial answer. Maybe we should be looking at how we live, and how our minds weren’t made for the lives we lead.

She wasn't a black hole, she decided. She was a volcano. And like a volcano, she couldn't run away from herself. She'd have to stay there and tend to that wasteland. She could plant a forest inside herself.

It is not you. It is simply something that happens to you. And something that can often be eased by talking. Words. Comfort. Support. It took me more than a decade to be able to talk openly, properly, to everyone, about my experience. I soon discovered the act of talking is in itself a therapy. Where talk exists, so does hope.

Maybe even suicide would have been too active. Maybe in some lives you just float around and expect nothing else and don’t even try to change. Maybe that was most lives. ‘Yes,’ said Nora, aloud now. ‘Maybe I got stuck. Maybe in every life I am stuck. I mean, maybe that’s just who I am. A starfish in every life is still a starfish. There isn’t a life where a starfish is a professor of aerospace engineering. And maybe there isn’t a life where I’m not stuck.

I wanted to be dead. No. That’s not quite right. I didn’t want to be dead, I just didn’t want to be alive. Death was something that scared me. And death only happens to people who have been living. There were infinitely more people who had never been alive. I wanted to be one of those people. That old classic wish. To never have been born. To have been one of the three hundred million sperm that hadn’t made it.

It is a strange irony that it was during the period when I most needed my mind to feel better, that I didn’t want to actively interfere with my mind. Not because I didn’t want to be well again, but because I didn’t really believe feeling well again was possible, or far less possible than feeling worse. And worse was terrifying.

He doesn’t look ill.’ Dawn still had glitter on her face from wherever she had been the night before. The glitter troubled me.‘I’m sorry,’ I said, weakly, wishing for a more visible illness.

I stared at myself in the mirror. I stared at my face until it was not my face. I went back to the table and sat down and I did not say how I was feeling to anyone. To say how I was feeling would lead to feeling more of what I was feeling.