Introduction

September, 2019. I’m having a severe panic attack. Yes, another one. I’m partway through writing this book and suddenly I fear that none of it is good enough. The gremlin of perpetual negativity hisses that in fact none of it ever has been. You’re an impossssssster, it snarls, sounding not unlike Gollum from Lord of the Rings. I’m curled up on my enormous and seductively comfortable, if impractically pale blue, sofa, knees hunched into my chest, arms clenched around them, rocking gently, realizing with a soft bitterness that some of the tired old tropes about madness may have some truth in them after all.