“Diagnoses, Dave thought, were rough guesses, blunt tools, always more inaccurate than they were helpful.”

“Don’t get sucked in, Dave was always saying to me. Kind of like Helder’s container idea: Notice everything, but don’t buy into it. Hold it.”

“Mental illness didn’t really change people. It just made them more of who they were going to be anyway. Mental illness was less like obliteration, more like italics.”

“I giggled and he took it very seriously and wrote everything down. I thought it was going too well, I was doing too well, it was going to look like nothing was wrong. I’m not this great! I wanted to say. Really, I’m a wreck, help! But I couldn’t speak up. I smiled and tried to look brilliant.”

“I was going to be in therapy for a long, long time. I wasn’t even a sentence yet. But I had some syllables, some new sounds. The first halves of the sentences I was accumulating were solid. I trusted them.”

“I started writing everything down.I wrote for the same reason someone lost sticks a message in a bottle. I’m here. Help. Please find me.”

“I think everyone has one day like this, and some people have more than one. It's the day of the accident, the midlife crisis, the breakdown, the meltdown, the walkout, the sellout, the giving up, giving away, or giving in. The day you stop drinking, or the day you start. The day you know things will never be the same again.”