“I speak of a clinical depression that is the background of your entire life, a background of anguish and anxiety, a sense that nothing goes well, that pleasure is unavailable and all your strategies collapse.” ~Leonard Cohen Right before my eighteenth birthday, when I was about to go to university, I was hit by a car and sustained multiple fractures to my right leg. This led to a couple of operations and the best part of ten months with me unable to walk. While all of my school friends and peers were having the time of their lives in school, I was silently suffering with depression and anxiety, both of which continued to increase. Whether it was the weed I smoked, the bottles of whiskey I drank, or the junk food I ate, I could not find comfort or relief from anywhere. Things just got worse, and I felt absorbed and consumed by the victim mentality that I had let penetrate my identity. I dropped out of university after re-doing my first year. Despite passing, I just couldn’t go back. I was so ashamed to be me. I didn’t even tell my future housemates that I wouldn’t be returning. About this time I realized there was a problem. In retrospect, it should have been glaringly obvious to me, with the self-medicating that was going on, but of course it’s harder to spot problems in ourselves. In two years I had gone from one of the most outgoing people I knew, someone who always liked to do things like play sports or party, to a recluse who needed some sort of alternate state of consciousness to function. I started working and going out again on the weekends with some of my old friends and people I had met through work. Naively I thought the problems were dissipating and I was returning to who I used to be. Now I look back on it and I know that the younger me had no idea who I was. Things leveled out for a few years until one day I had a breakdown on the way to work. There was now no denying the extent of the problem, but hell, if you are in denial you can dig your heels in pretty firmly, and that’s what I did. After a few more years of self-medicating, something happened, and to this day I can’t put my finger on the trigger, but something changed that made me realize enough was enough. A good friend recommended a therapist to me, and I was keen to see him and work through the issues that had been building up for seven years. So I met with Peter and it seemed like an expensive chat with a nice guy for the first five or six sessions. Around this time I also had had a regular meditation practice. One day whilst meditating I felt like I gave myself permission to open up at the next session [...]