I’d title my teenage years ‘The Hard Years.’ I was suicidal, deeply depressed, and completely emotionally unstable, and the adults around me either didn’t notice or brushed it off.

My dad especially tried to turn me into ‘the crazy one’ instead of looking at what was actually happening in my life, and that label followed me for years.

I left my parents’ house at 18 to get away from that, but the damage was already there—I’ve been admitted to psychiatric hospitals more than forty times over my life.

What finally got me through that chapter was time, distance, and stubborn survival. I went back and forth to my parents’ house for years, and it’s really only in the last 8–10 years—after eight straight years without a psychiatric hospitalization—that my life has started to feel genuinely stable.