People often say to begin at childhood, but the truth is, that child felt invisible to the world and even to herself.

I didn’t really meet her until I was 17, when I ran away from my mother’s house. I was tired of feeling sheltered, confined by beliefs that didn’t feel like my own, searching for something I couldn’t yet name. Love, freedom, identity.

I met her again in the middle of chaos, during a breaking point in an abusive relationship filled with confusion and unfamiliar pain. She showed up in the moments I felt most lost, but I didn’t yet know how to listen.

At 21, I heard her the clearest. She was crying out through heartbreak, homelessness, and deep loneliness. That pain felt unbearable, and I made a decision to escape it the only way I thought I could. I overdosed.

But that wasn’t the end.

We came back together as strangers, waking up in an emergency room surrounded by unfamiliar faces who treated us like the scum of the earth. That moment marked the beginning of something I didn’t yet understand.

What followed was a month moving through systems meant to stabilize me, from the hospital to a psych ward, and then to a psychiatric hospital. It was disorienting, overwhelming, and at times frightening. But it was also the first time I began to see that survival might carry a deeper purpose.

It was the first time I felt what it meant to begin coming back to myself, to sit with the pain instead of numbing it. For the first time, drugs did not feel like the only answer, and neither did suicide.

Something shifted. Not all at once, and not perfectly, but enough for me to start questioning if there could be more for me than just surviving.

Looking back now, I can see that the moments that once broke me are the very ones that allow me to understand others in theirs. What once felt like the end of my story became the beginning of my ability to show up for myself, and eventually, for others who needed someone like me, the way I once needed someone like me.