For some of us, mental illness can begin to seem a lifelong companion. Once that is recognised there may be different reactions at different times. The illness may seem like a malignant and resident evil that you want to oust with as much vigour as a malignant cancer, yet it may seem entwined with your very soul. You try every therapy and every treatment, visit every witch doctor in the area yet it will not leave completely. So you reach acceptance, and start to view your illness as a companion on the road. Perhaps a visitor, who if you get to know and listen to carefully you may get to glimpse a compassionate cast to it's eye, a gentleness to it's gaze. Winston Churchill called his depression a 'black dog'.

In 1999, when I was just starting to draw with pastels for the first time in many years I made the drawings on which this and the 'The Seal Charmer' are based. It's wonderful to be able to go back to those sketches and recreate more completely what I saw in my mind's eye.

I still vascillate from attempts to rid myself of what I see as an unwished for invasion of my being, to seeing that actually, the illness is not in itself evil, it simply 'is' and there are times to struggle and times to rest and wisdom is knowing the difference.

The water IS flowing, it never stands still, so even if you stop rowing for a while, and take a rest, the water will take you somewhere else. Nothing is forever, not even feelings of depression.