Why I’m me

It’s only since watching Stephen Fry’s brilliant Secret Life of the Manic Depressive (BBC2, Tuesday) that I’ve begun properly to understand why I am the way I am. Lots of people have suggested to me at one time or another that I should see a psychiatrist. ‘You’re so successful,’ they say. ‘How can you possibly think your life sucks?’ But in the past I’ve always put this down to their pitiful underestimation of just how much success I deserve. Now, though, I’m prepared ever so slightly to concede that maybe, yes, I do have a mild form of mental illness which on some days gives me wildly inflated expectations of how wonderful life ought to be for me all the time, and on others makes me realise that in fact I am utterly talentless and worthless and that everything I do is doomed to fail.

Fry seems to have it much worse than me.