I think by getting up the courage to believe in myself enough to dispute some of the things I was brought up to think about myself, and to dispute what some other people thought I was. It developed into a period where my former anxieties seemed to be removed, my thoughts formerly suppressed could flow cleanly, and with that flow of thinking I could understand what other people were doing.

But, this led to rejection (by my therapist) and a devastating breakdown, during which I experienced a lot of things I had only read about in fiction before -- terrible things. So I learned that I had a lot of terrible potentialities too, and how people in general can suffer. Finding those things out about myself also enabled me to understand other people.

Maybe I had to live through some of that, at least in my head, to understand it really.