Thank you for your perception I’m 48. I spent 23 years as a doctor, including psychiatry. I survived a brain tumour, lost people I loved, went through depression that didn’t respond to medication, and came out the other side without drugs. I’m not offering therapy. I’m offering what I wish I’d had: someone who has actually been inside the same darkness and found a way through. The belief that intelligence should protect you from this kind of pain is itself part of the trap. You can understand the neuroscience, name the cognitive distortions, even teach others how to cope and still wake up at 3am feeling like something is fundamentally wrong with being alive. Knowledge about pain is not the same as relief from it. Psychache doesn’t respond to insight. It responds to being truly heard by someone who has been there. That’s a different thing entirely.

That last line is everything. Being heard is not a small thing. It is often the only thing.