Elitsa Dermendzhiyska - What Doesnt Kill You

What Doesnt Kill You is published with thanks for support from a number of patrons:

KPMG

MediaCom

Dr Frederick Mulder CBE

Pets at Home

Sage

The best way to educate, challenge opinion and remove stigma is to articulate experience through storytelling and personal experience. It is only through hearing the impact on an individual that you can truly start to empathise and challenge your own views. Education and the removal of stigma around mental health has, and continues to be, a key focus for The Ardonagh Group and weve made great strides in this area with more progress still to be made. We are proud to have supported What Doesnt Kill You and helped to share such impactful stories around this important issue.

The Ardonagh Group

I have had a good fifty-year career in the drinks industry, but in 2016, due to severe stress, I had major mental health issues. When I recovered, I decided to give back to society in this crucial arena and am now President of The Shaw Mind Foundation: www.shawmindfoundation.org. Our mission is to provide society and communities with mental health and wellbeing support.

Dr James Espey OBE

You never know what other people are going through. Over the years, Ive employed over 4,000 people and I learned very quickly that lots of them live with secret battles every day. So, I made it my business to ensure that staff and their families were supported and that they had full access to employee assistance programmes. Since selling my company, I still feel a huge sense of loyalty to my team and will continue to support projects that promote mental wellness.

Helen McArdle CBE, entrepreneur and philanthropist

We are the leading Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Dynamics 365 Business Central reseller in the UK. Were slightly quirkier than the average software reseller and have a very passionate, innovative and customer-centric company culture. As a company we provide staff with the necessary means to support their mental health and have a team of volunteers available to give advice and help those in need.

The NAV | 365 People

Onfido is a proud sponsor of What Doesnt Kill You . It is incumbent on businesses, as a key pillar of society, to respond to the mental health challenges of the modern world by supporting employees to bring their whole being to work during bad times as well as good. We try our best to make this a reality in our culture and practices, as it is simply the right and moral thing to do. Happily, what is good for human beings is almost always good for business too!

Onfido

London-based tech firm Softwire has spent the last twenty years building the best environment for its staff to thrive. We think commercial pressures should sit alongside human ones: that putting staff welfare first also makes us more successful. Our efforts to make that a reality include launching a discussion around mental health. Were still figuring some things out, but just like maintaining code, its not about being perfect its about continuously questioning and having the courage to change.

Softwire

Founders of start-ups face both common and unique stressors that can trigger mental wellness challenges. At Techstars, we believe its important to support founders by having open and honest conversations about mental wellness. Within our accelerator programs specifically, we encourage self-care and activities to help develop positive mental wellness habits and successful approaches to managing stress.

Brad Feld, Techstars co-founder

In 2016 I left my job as product manager of the technology start-up Id co-founded in London and set out to study mental health. Over the next year I dug into psychology, neuroscience and genetics, interviewed clinicians, nurses and psycho-therapists, talked to entrepreneurs, City professionals, video-game players, artists and young people. The more I learned, the more enamoured I became of our shared human experience from the tenderness of our pain to the exquisite resilience that runs through us even when we are at our most fragile. Never before had I heard more fascinating stories not in the public conversations about mental health, not even in the books I devoured in a desperate search for insight.

And so I decided to create the book which I wanted to read but could not find. The idea was simple: to seek out the most original thinkers in the UK who were willing to reveal their deepest personal struggles on the page. Months of detective work, aided by a blissful ignorance of book publishing, finally yielded the beguiling cast of characters youll meet in this book. They include acclaimed novelists, beloved comedians, ingenious artists, distinguished academics and trailblazing explorers who will take you on a journey to the darkest recesses of their minds. And as they probe their most private fears, the authors will grapple with questions that haunt all of us:

How can we live with our demons?

How can we grow from our wounds?

How can we write another story when the one we wanted

is taken away from us?

Despite its heavy subject matter, this is a hopeful book. Its hope, however, is not the cheap kind peddled by the masters of self-help. Its the kind of hope you can only find when you let the old delusions go and learn to dance with your fears.

Elitsa Dermendzhiyska

London, April 2019

David Whyte

Poet David Whyte grew up with a strong, imaginative influence from his Irish mother among the hills and valleys of his fathers Yorkshire. The author of nine books of poetry and four books of prose, he now lives in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.

Beginning well or beginning poorly, what is important is simply to begin, but the ability to make a good beginning is also an art form. Beginning well involves a clearing away of the crass, the irrelevant and the complicated to find the beautiful, often hidden lineaments of the essential and the necessary.

Beginning is difficult, and our procrastination is a fine ever-present measure of our reluctance in taking that first close-in, courageous step to reclaiming our happiness. Perhaps, because taking a new step always leads to a kind of radical internal simplification, where, suddenly, very large parts of us, parts of us we have kept gainfully employed for years, parts of us still rehearsing the old complicated story, are suddenly out of a job. There occurs, in effect, a form of internal corporate downsizing, where the parts of us too afraid to participate or having nothing now to offer are let go, with all of the accompanying death-like trauma, and where the very last fight occurs, a rearguard disbelief that this new, less complicated self, and this very simple step, is all that is needed for the new possibilities ahead.

It is always hard to believe that the courageous step is so close to us, that it is closer than we ever could imagine, that in fact, we already know what it is, and that the step is simpler, more radical than we had thought: which is why we so often prefer the story to be more elaborate, our identities clouded by fear, the horizon safely in the distance, the essay longer than it needs to be and the answer safely in the realm of impossibility.

A. J. Ashworth

A. J. Ashworth is the author of the prize-winning short story collection Somewhere Else, or Even Here and the editor of Red Room: New Short Stories Inspired by the Bronts . She lives with her family in Blackburn, plays online chess (badly), and likes astronomy and dragonflies.

Everything is the past.