Like most people, you are not able to face more than one fear during your lifetime. You also spend your life fleeing from your first fear towards your first hope. Be careful that you do not, through your own wiliness, end up always in the same position in which you began. (Jane Bowles)

I was invited by Alex to share my personal account of mental illness, and was reminded of this by Joel White’s moving reflections about his experience of breakdown and its transformative impact on his life. Well here’s the thing: I’ve already recounted the ins and outs of my own experience of breakdown, on my personal blog. My posts there record the evolution of my reflections over the past few years, as I headed into crisis and emerged from it into recovery and renewal, into the present. So I’m not going to dig too deeply into that – though please bear with me here, because I’m going to try to use it as a springboard to something else. Read more…