Why I want to be what I want to be.

An excerpt from Kay Redfield Jamison's memoir on her road to recovery from bipolar disorder and manic depression:

"The debt I owe my psychiatrist is beyond description. I remember sitting in his office a hundred times during those grim months and each time thinking, What on earth can he say that will make me feel better or keep me alive? Well, there never was anything he could say, that's the funny thing. It was all the stupid, desperately optimistic, condescending things he DIDN'T say that kept me alive; all the compassion and warmth I felt from him that could not have been said; all the intelligence, competence, and time he put into it; and his granite belief that mine was a life worth living.

He was terribly direct, which was terribly important, and he was willing to admit the limits of his understanding and treatments and when he was wrong. Most difficult to put into words, but in many ways the essence of everything: he taught me that the road from suicide to life is cold and colder and colder still, but -- with steely effort, the grace of God, and an inevitable break in the weather -- that I could make it."