Stephen Fry is my role model. He is incredibly smart, humble and (in my opinion at least) funny. He studied English literature, I studied English literature. We both tend to dress like tweedy English teachers. We both struggle with ourselves.

Last year I read his autobiography, The Fry Chronicles and I watched his documentary on mental illness, The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive. I highly recommend both of these!

I struggle with anxiety and anxiety attacks. It can be so frustrating when even the people you love just don't understand - I can't count how many times I've heard "Just don't worry about it!"... if only it were that easy! Fry perfectly echoes that sentiment in this article where he says:

That’s the point, there is no “why?” That’s not the right question. There is no reason. If there was reason for it, you could reason someone out of it.

Luckily, my condition is not so bad as his. I mostly have my anxiety under control except for times of great emotional stress (at one particularly bad time I had 4 very strong anxiety attacks in a month). Also luckily according to his twitter feed, Fry is doing much better these days.