Eleanor Ross doesn’t immediately strike me as being in any way mediocre.
For starters, she’s dialling to our chat from Rome, where she’s just started a new communications job. Her journalism CV reads like a rundown of Britain’s most illustrious publications and at 31, she has just published her second book. So far, so ‘successful’.
And yet, in 2019, Ross broke down. Suicidal and overwhelmed, she found herself heading to a bridge in London with the express aim of ending her life. In the months that followed, her assessment of the path she took to mental health crisis revealed a scenario all too familiar to many – striving for success, saying yes to every opportunity, and collapsing under the weight of it all.
“I'm not a particularly depressed person, I'm very seize the day. And I think my brain just snapped,” she muses now. “I was trying to do too much. I took on too many things. I had been a freelance journalist for a decade, and it got to the point where I was saying yes to everything. You never want to miss an opportunity, you never want to say no, or sour a relationship with somebody. It was up to me to manage those deadlines, and ultimately I delivered none of them. Because my brain just went…” she tails off, waving her arms around in some physical approximation of an explosion.
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