This much I know: Sophie White, author

Anyone who comes back from the brink of suicide is a survivor: Sophie White.

From the age of five, my life-long ambition was to be an artist. Art came along before food, and then food came along way before I started writing.

I grew up in a society of adults, a precocious, only child. Having no siblings can breed eccentricity. I got taken down a bit by my peers in school.

I wouldn’t say I’m a particularly driven person, but I was driven to get to NCAD to study sculpture. I made art to avoid language and communication. I found anything to do with writing very difficult.

I’m not keen on dogs. My earliest memory is age three, climbing onto the back of a bike, a dog barking, causing me to get my foot stuck in the spokes of the wheel. The bike rolled backwards and I broke my foot... I’ve nothing against bikes though.

If I could be reborn for a day I’d be artist Louise Bourgeois. No, Frida Kahlo — more craic. I love her and the world as she depicts it. I’m attracted to that colour and mayhem, the sensuality of it all. And she hung out with a good crowd, and had a good wardrobe.

The best advice I got was from my dad. I was fretting about how a friend was really getting to me and he said, you know you will have this time and again, until you learn how to let other people go.

My idea of misery is having to be around people all day every day. I’d hate a day without my own company. I’m very sociable but need my space.

The trait I most admire in others is competence and self belief.

My biggest fault is being a catastrophist.

When I left college, I had a nervous breakdown that contributed to me giving up art, and taking up cooking.

In college, I was fond of magic mushrooms, smoked a lot of weed, did the odd pill. Then, I took a pill one Saturday night at Electric Picnic, and flipped a switch.

At first, I thought it was just a bad trip and kept the head during it, drinking lots of water and believing that it would pass once the drug was out of my system. But next morning after a couple of seconds of normality, I woke up into a nightmare, as if I was coming up on the drug again.

It was a mental assault without end, I’d heightened auditory interference and delusional distorted thinking with an hallucinatory slant to it. Everything looked wrong and I was obsessed that nothing was real, that the memories of my life were a construct. It didn’t stop… for years.

I ended up on anti-depressants and anti-psychotics. Counselling was a help and I think cognitive behaviour therapy is really brilliant.

The biggest challenge I’ve had was the silence around something like that happening to you. Knowing that I might have been the architect of my own madness simply added to the problem. I didn’t even tell my friends for quite a while.

But I was lucky, I’m middle class and educated and was able to move back in with my parents and then, when things got worse and I became suicidal and really vulnerable, to pay for private treatment in St John of Gods.

After the breakdown, I needed to be grounded. Art, being constantly inside my own head, was not what I needed at all. That’s when I found cooking. I went travelling, and started working in a café in New Zealand.

At first it was just prepping things but I progressed to wanting to cook more professionally. I found I enjoyed the demands of cooking — of performance and of being in the moment. It enabled me to regain my confidence. Given the stress factor it was an unusual decision, I do grant you, for someone who’d had a breakdown.

I’m 30 now. I’m no longer on medication. My son is two and a half and there’s another baby on the way. My husband Sebastian is in IT recruitment.

We started going out together shortly before I had my breakdown and I used to feel sorry for him — that maybe I was not the kind of person he thought he was getting.

The lesson so far has been — don’t plan. Live in the moment. Planning has let me down.

Recipes for a Nervous Breakdown (and how to cook yourself sane-ish) by Sophie White is published by Gill Books and is out now priced at €24.99, £21.99.