Until Five (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798193687375)

What happens when the life you knew stops working-and you can no longer force yourself through it?

Every morning, Mara Valle woke with the feeling that the day stretched ahead of her like an impossible distance. Her only goal was to make it to five-the hour when the anxiety loosened enough for her to breathe.

What began as exhaustion eventually brought her life to a halt. Depression, anxiety, unexplained physical symptoms, grief, and old memories forced her to confront not only what was happening to her, but the rules she had spent a lifetime living by: keep going, be useful, cope, endure.

UNTIL FIVE is an intimate memoir about collapse, loss, identity, and the slow work of learning to stay with yourself when returning to who you were is no longer possible.

There are no easy answers here, no miraculous recovery, and no promise that pain can be transformed into something useful.

Only the honest account of a woman learning that sometimes moving forward does not mean becoming who you were again.

Sometimes, it simply means making it to five