What I learnt from sharing my most private pain with a semi-professional problem-solver was that the mere act of asking for help was, in itself, healing. It was as if I had crept down to the docks under the cover of darkness and floated a message out in a bottle, imagining how it might be received. By writing it I was acknowledging that someone might care about me; that they’d be able to say the right thing without knowing me. Because I was feeling something other people had felt and therefore I wasn’t, as I’d suspected, the loneliest and strangest woman in the world.
