Honestly, just the ‘fuck you’ reaction I had when thinking about those people who I blamed for making me unhappy. I’d gone from feeling nothing - no joy, no happiness - for months, to feeling incredibly sad and in constant emotional pain. For weeks I was terrified of going to bed knowing I wouldn’t sleep, then terrified of getting up knowing how horrible each day would be. It doesn’t sound as bad reading it back as how it was, but at the time I just didn’t feel like I could get through another day.

Right at the end, I thought about those people I saw and worked with who never have to ever deal with anything similar, who I blamed for much of what I found unsatisfactory about my life, and I thought about how unfair it all was, and how I figured they’d react if I was gone. I thought about the specific things they’d say, and I got angry at them. Really angry. That anger carried me through another day - I wasn’t going to give them the chance to say those fictional things I’d invented - and then another and another, and gradually I didn’t need to work so hard at it anymore. Gradually my stubbornness saw me through and the pain went away.

That was about four years ago. Learning about my mental illness since then has taught me that a large part of my arsenal in combating it is just allowing time to pass like that. I’ve been through therapy and counselling, been on and off medication, but still I know that when it gets bad I can just cling to that certainty that I’ll feel enough better to get through things if I can just eke my way through those few days when it’s really bad.

I’ve been off meds for over a year now, and have my condition down to where I pretty much just get one or two episodes per year, and those episodes are nowhere near as bad as they used to be. I don’t need the anger to get through anymore, thanks to various therapeutic and meditative techniques. And I very much forgave the people I used to blame for how I felt a long time ago.