It was supposed to be a new chapter.
The job at Freedom House had shown me that maybe—just maybe—I could reclaim a career in mental health. I was working with children again. No one questioned me. My past, for once, wasn’t a disqualifier. I had begun to believe that the world might finally see me for who I was—not who Ana claimed I had been.
Then, I was…
Barriers That Don’t Die Easily
Even with my CPSS certification in hand and nearly two decades separating me from the injustice that wrecked my life, I couldn’t escape its shadow.
I wanted to work. Really work. Not just to survive, but to reclaim who I used to be—before the system stole my career, my name, and a part of my sense of self.
I knew applying for…
Becoming a Certified Peer Support Specialist
I first heard the title “Certified Peer Support Specialist” during a WRAP (Wellness Recovery Action Plan) group at the UNC Center for Excellence in Community Mental Health. The facilitator—open, warm, and unapologetically honest—wasn't just someone with credentials. He was someone who had lived it. His mental health history…
Where do you go after the edge?
I left the hospital in December 2019 no longer suicidal, but still fractured. I wasn’t healed. But something had shifted. The spiral of silence was broken. And for the first time in years, I didn’t want to disappear.
I wanted to live. But I didn’t yet know how.
Finding My First Steps…
Someone Saved My Life
I might never have written this book if that conversation hadn’t shattered my isolation and made me question what I thought I knew—that I was alone, unworthy, unlovable.
It was a Sunday night in the hospital, but time meant nothing. The hours blurred together as I paced the dimly lit hallway outside the nurses’ station, sleepless…
How do you respond
to the absurd?
How do intelligent people—
repeat,
like ditto-heads,
words they heard,
hoping to shut down
those who disagree?
They have forgotten
even the meaning of the word—
truth.
God—
(or gods, or something else entirely?)—
laughs
at mankind’s folly.
If the sacred
is beyond all things,
could it be reduced
to books,
to ink,
to words?
A few thousand years—
a fleeting breath
in all that is,
or ever was,
or ever will be.
My voice that was mute again in the classrooms growing up had been mute and silent when I found myself standing in front of a judge. Similarly, I hardly said anything to anyone after the devastating events in 2006.
For years, I had carried my shame in silence, believing that no one would ever truly understand. I had wasted time searching for validation from people (my so-…
December 2019.
It hadn’t come out of nowhere. That’s the first thing I need to say.
It wasn’t sudden. It wasn’t a breakdown or a psychotic snap. It was more like a slow erosion—a quiet, daily wearing away of hope, purpose, and identity.
It was the accumulation of years spent trying to live in a world where a lie had…
Talk therapy had never helped.
Too many years of hearing therapists ask:
“How does that make you feel?”
“Have you tried reframing the experience?”
“What would it take for you to move on?”
Move on? From what? From being falsely accused, shackled, humiliated—treated like a danger to society when I had been the one crying out for help? I didn’t know how I felt. Not really.…