A few weeks after the worst had passed and I was better able to function, I sat across from my therapist, curled up on her couch. She regarded me with concern and compassion in equal measure. I felt safe for the first time in a long time. I felt like we were going to fix this. Together.

“How would you feel if I said I think you had a nervous breakdown?” she said slowly, carefully, her eyes fixed on me in a cautious manner I’d not seen before.

I considered her question.

As she waited for me to elaborate, I noticed an internal rush of something that felt very much like relief. Yes, I was relieved by the thought I’d had a breakdown. Oddly reassured. The 12 days I had spent in a state of crippling panic and anxiety had felt as big as a nervous breakdown. And as bad. I wanted it to have a dramatic sounding name because that robbed my experience of some of its terrifying power. It existed. It was something that had happened to other people, people who had survived it.

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I was also reassured because a nervous breakdown sounded rare. Not something you would have regularly in your life. Not just a paralysing new way of being. It sounded like an event with a start and a finish. A one-off. Twice, tops.

“Good. I feel good about you calling it a nervous breakdown.” I replied slowly. And I exhaled for what felt like the first time in weeks.

……It had all started, oddly enough, with a week at a health retreat. This is where you’re meant to go to remedy a health crisis, not trigger one.

I can’t even recall exactly why I went although I recall it was a freebie; a trip offered in exchange for me writing honestly about my experience. It’s the kind of thing I usually loathe – group activities, no wifi, deprivation of any kind – but I was feeling a bit restless on my goat track and I recognised I probably had a few grooves that were running a little too deep. I wanted to shift my headspace.

They’re unnaturally intense places, health retreats, despite the surface pretense of tranquility. People tend to visit them when they’re at a crossroads, when they have a big decision to make or when their lives have somehow become out of control – physically or emotionally.

In my buggy on day 2 of the health retreat, happy after downing more Panadol

Addictions, relationship breakdowns, mental illness, stress burnouts, sudden career changes; people arrive at the gates of a health retreat with more baggage than Heathrow and there’s a very high ratio of dysfunction among guests willing to spend upwards of $10K for a week of outdoor exercise and extreme fibre.

People’s vulnerabilities tend to bubble to the surface at the compulsory communal meals as you’re stripped of the armour of your regular life. Lymphatic drainage combined with 5:30am tai chi and extreme carb deprivation puts a person quickly off-kilter.

When I’d enquired at this health retreat about a possible visit in the week before Christmas, they told me they would be delighted to accommodate me during their ‘sleep week’ program designed for people who had trouble with insomnia or other sleep disorders. The only sleep disorder I had was not getting enough of it due to 15 years of parenthood, a toddler and a business which was relentlessly sucking all available hours from my days and frequently my nights too.

As with most health retreats, this one informed me that the formal program of lectures and activities was optional but “we strongly encourage it so as to maximise the benefit of your stay”.

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I’m very bad at resisting peer pressure and I suffer from chronic FOMO so I reluctantly decided to do all the activities and suck it up - even the 5:30am Tai Chi class, the health lectures and the group meals. I loathe group meals. I would rather self-harm with a fork.

I did enjoy my week, even though I hated everything for the first 48 hours with ferocious predictability. As you always do when thrown together with random strangers, I ended up bonding with some unlikely people including a hilarious wealthy couple who invited me back to their suite for a threesome one night after our sustainable, high protein group dinner.

He was in his late sixties, she her late fifties.

I graciously declined.

The regime at the retreat was strict. No sugar, no caffeine, no dairy, no wheat, no alcohol, no soy, no processed food and very few carbs. Basically my entire diet. Gone. Poof.

There was also no Internet or mobile phone use of any kind. For the first couple of days, I reeled. The withdrawal from sugar and tea and connectivity was brutal and I inhaled Panadol at regular intervals to deal with my crippling headaches.

But by day three I was kind of euphoric. Drunk on nothing but fresh air and pulses. The meals tasted delicious, the company was enjoyable and my chronic addiction to total sensory stimulation was interrupted. Much to my surprise, this interruption felt like relief.

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I’ve always been happiest while multi-tasking. I like having stimulation bombard me from many different sources at once. Radio, screens, eating, drinking, TV in the background, the sound of people talking…I like to dive deep into sensory overload, even while I write.

Put me on a mountain with nothing except spearmint tea and a strict timetable of aqua Pilates, reiki massage and small talk with strangers and my system went into abrupt shock before reluctantly and then enthusiastically recalibrating itself.

I started loving the shit out of this clean living Zen business.

I’m nothing if not extreme. But would it, could it last? Was this kind of pure life sustainable for me?

The only other time I’d been to a health retreat, I’d celebrated at the airport on the way home by eating the biggest Kit Kat I could find washed down with a Chocolate Moove but this time I decided to take the detox home with me. Embrace it fully. Live the clean life forever.

This was a mistake.

At the time it seemed righteous and sensible. A clean break from my mildly toxic former lifestyle.

But it’s clear to me now that it was the most reckless and foolish thing I could have done and if you’re anything like me, I caution strongly against it.

You see, in the parallel universe of health retreats, there is - perversely - very little time to be idle or even think. Your days are jammed with activities, lectures, intimate conversations with strangers about bowel movements and treatments with exotic names and ambitious purposes like “Chakra Realignment Facial”. It can border on frantic. Also, everything is taken care of.

Someone tells you where to go and hands you a little card with your daily timetable on it each morning while you throw back your 6am shot of apple cider vinegar. You have no watch and no phone. There’s a team of people to cook and serve your sustainable meals and every need is pre-emptively met.. Someone is always there to tell you where to go next and what to do. You make no choices about food and you barely even have to decide what to wear; it’s 24/7 tracksuit pants, no make-up and dirty hair shoved under a cap. A health retreat is the opposite of real life in every possible way. It’s like being a very small child who is only expected to do the most basic of things for themselves, like chew their food and go to the toilet.

You’re also heavily indoctrinated in the evils of life’s pleasures: sugar, salt, alcohol, caffeine, bread, and connectivity. In one of my ’treatment’ sessions, I was warned by the naturopath of the carcinogenic effects of many of the things that held my life together, including stress. I instantly became extremely stressed about the idea of stress causing cancer.

Having drunk the sugar-free, organic Kool-Aid, when I returned home, I vowed with evangelical fervour that I would maintain these new healthy habits I’d formed in the previous five days.

I would make my entire life a health retreat dammit. Naturally, this meant dashing to the nearest health food store and spending hundreds of dollars on Amaranth flour, organic activated walnuts and Australian-grown chia seeds. I’d already bought every cookbook available at the health retreat gift shop, which, for someone who doesn’t cook, was impressively optimistic. I resumed none of my ‘bad’ habits after I returned home. No tea. No sugar. Few carbs. Nothing that wasn’t organic. Including beauty products and water. And I kept my external stimulation down to an absolute bare minimum including no radio of any kind, not even music in the car.

Of course this was much, much harder to do surrounded by a world of “normal” people who were just getting on with their lives than it had been when I was safely ensconced in the retreat bubble. This cooking my own meals thing was a goddamn bitch.

Still, I pushed through.

It was just before Christmas, work was winding down and we left for our annual summer holiday to Byron Bay with the kids. Just to make sure I stayed on message, the universe took this opportunity to crash the hard drive on my laptop. It couldn’t be revived.

The significance of this technology fail on my psyche cannot be overstated. As a writer and online publisher, I have an intensely intimate relationship with my laptop. It’s an extension of who I am. It’s my handbag, my wardrobe, my office, my creativity and my brain in physical form. I am hugely dependent on it not just to do my work but also to live my life. I think it would be easier for me to live without my car. Or tea.

So yes, thank you Universe for leaving me completely untethered and alone with my herbal fucking tea and my bullshit Acai berries.

My nervous breakdown commenced very quietly on day three of our holiday, with a simple twinge in my lower abdomen one morning.

It was my ovary. I had cancer. It was obvious to me in the same way I knew I had brown eyes. An unshakable fact.

I knew ovarian cancer was usually terminal and that it worked quite quickly. It had few symptoms which would explain why I seemed otherwise healthy. But I was going to die. That small twinge on Christmas Eve as I got out of bed was all it took to catapult me into a crippling anxiety attack that would last 12 days.

On the outside I appeared relatively normal if withdrawn. My husband later said he could tell something was up but he was fairly accustomed to my moods so he had no idea what I was experiencing, even as we spent every day and night together with the kids. Children are wonderfully self-absorbed so they wouldn’t have picked up anything either. I wasn’t curled in a corner. I wasn’t in bed. I was walking around and talking and going to the beach and to dinner and all the normal things you do while on holidays.

"I posed for holiday happy snaps as if everything was normal"

We had Christmas and took photos and all the while, I was going through the motions while my mind and body were virtually paralysed with fear.

There was the clenching in my stomach. The absolute frantic dread that made my heart beat fast and my bones ache. All day. The unshakable belief I was dying. What about my children? I was so stricken at the thought of leaving them, I could barely function through the horror.

Every day, hundreds of times, I imagined saying goodbye to my family. I imagined my funeral in vivid detail. I imagined my kids growing up without me. And it was sickeningly real, like watching a documentary about someone else’s tragic life cut short by a terrible disease.

All overlaid with the utter certainty that this was real and inevitable and happening to me right now.

. I couldn’t tell Jason because by some magical thinking, that would make it even more real. I couldn’t deal with his reaction to my impending death. We would have to tell the kids I was dying and I couldn’t bear it,

I went through the motions of preparing for Christmas, buying presents for the kids, assembling a makeshift tree and it was all made deeply poignant and tragic because I knew it would be one of only a handful of Christmases left for us as a family, maybe the last. How the hell were my children going to live without me? How was I to bear the agony of not seeing them grow up?

If depression is a heavy, listless, exhausted feeling, this was the opposite. It was panic. Like I was under a dramatic, imminent threat.

The only thing that brought me any brief respite from the terror and dread was exercise. I went for long walks and runs on the beach, I did surfing lessons and I went horse riding. When I was active and madly distracted, the tsunami of fear receded just a little. Adrenaline and endorphins helped. So did wine.

I began to crave my nightly glass because it took the edge off. Within days I began contemplating drinking in the morning. The tiny part of my brain still rooted in logic stopped me from doing it but I could see how easy it would be to self-medicate anxiety with alcohol. Going a few generations back in my family tree, I suddenly saw how that may have been happened.

When I was exercising or drinking wine, I wasn’t able to have fun or enjoy myself - not even close - but it gave my mind some very brief respite from the anguish and grief about the fact I was dying and my children would have to grow up without their mum.

"I went through the motions of doing normal holiday things but I was numb and fearful during every moment"

Bizarrely enough, the only other time I could escape was when I was asleep. I had no trouble sleeping during the 12 days of my anxiety attack; something my therapist and other doctors later ag