What's obvious to me isn't always obvious to other people.

I suspect our human "thinking processes" often "break down," but you rarely notice anything's wrong, because your systems so quickly switch you to think in different ways, while the systems that failed are repaired or replaced.

When you’re going through a breakdown, a good question to ask is what is actually breaking down. We usually think it’s our self. But what’s typically happening is that our struggle to deny our emotional truth is breaking down. Emotional distress is a signal that it’s getting harder to remain emotionally unconscious. It means we’re about to discover our true selves underneath all that story business.

How could you disguise your own thoughts so even you didn't know what you were thinking?

It’s hard to spot a spiritual crisis: Usually it is disguised as a crisis in our relationships, finances, career, or family.

I’ve been going through depression in my life and people don’t know this. They see me smile and play table tennis, but people can’t tell what I’m going through.

You are mentally unstable

if you are thinking without knowing you are thinking, you are confused about who and what you are.

Here’s a curious fact about human beings: we have a really hard time realizing that something isn’t there.

Sometimes you have to lose your mind before you come to your senses.

We cannot describe it. We cannot reveal it. And when we do, we disappear.

It's hard to be what you can't see.

If breakdown happens, you must never, ever think that it’s a sign of weakness or it’s a failure. Do not give up hope. Keep trying. Knock on every door.

Perhaps this is the bottom line to mental illness: incomprehensible events occur; your life becomes a bin for hoax-like fluctuations of what used to be reality. And not only that — as if that weren't enough — but you, like Fat, ponder forever over these fluctuations in an effort to order them into a coherency, when in fact the only sense they make is the sense you impose on them, out of the necessity to restore everything into shapes and processes you can recognize. The first thing to depart in mental illness is the familiar. And what takes its place is bad news because not only can you not understand it, you also cannot communicate it to other people. The madman experiences something, but what it is or where it comes from he does not know.