Could you tell me a time you felt hopeful?

I remember sitting in the shade of the trees in the beautiful rolling hills above Barcelona in May 2016, making notes in a journal.

I was spending a week at the Universitas Telefónica (my then employer's University. Yeah, I know.) learning about myself and my mind. I would historically have rejected the prospect of a week internalising my thoughts and "understanding myself" as a total waste of time. I'm a doer. An extrovert. I'm positive and outgoing. Forthright and confident. Job done. What's next? But this came at a really opportune time for me. After what can only really be described as a full on depressive anxious breakdown in the middle of 2014. 

A combination of work and family stresses had progressively taken me to a place where my brain stopped working. I was managing no more than two hours sleep a night for several months and if you live with that for long enough you just stop functioning. On pretty much any level really. And I couldn't see how I got there let alone how I would get out again. 

I was trapped in an awful constricting spiral. And then I reached my rock bottom. Sat in a meeting at work and I realised the people in it with me were just staring at me - unable to fathom how a successful leader in their business could barely remember what day it was or why we were meeting. Thankfully, one of them was my boss and she saw the signs and got me out of there. Fast. 

Having pulled the ripcord and taken extended time off work, I'd then spent 18 months getting to know my mind a lot more clearly. Through a brief process of enforced rest, some pretty mild head drugs and then CBT therapy and then slow rehabilitation I was more attuned to the need to understand why I felt like I did. What caused it and hopefully how to deal with it then and now. 

Sat in the shade in Barcelona was toward the end of that process. A time I felt hopeful, having felt devoid of hope just two years earlier.

In the journal, I am writing a letter to my middle son about how I want to be a better father to him. To acknowledge and empathise with him about how differently he approaches the world to how I do. We all have very different personalities. In my bumbling extroversion, I sometimes struggle to acknowledge this. My mind is still a work in progress, but it's work I take on happily - hopeful of the future.