July 18, 2019:
Descent and return.
I wanted to write the ancient mythological cycle, using what I knew: the loss that triggered my breakdown, the period of misery itself, the long slow climb to recovery.
I focused on the loss, which at the time was where my preoccupation rested. But that wasn't the interesting thing. I'm a terribly slow learner, so that it required another couple of decades to cotton on to the fact that the breakdown was the substance. The loss was just the gateway, where in proportion gateways are inherently trivial.