A personal memoir exploring trauma, depression, and survival. From the first encounter with darkness at eighteen to decades of therapy, this essay traces the enduring impact of assault, self-reflection, and the daily work of living under the weight of mental illness.

The descent into depression is not predictable. It begins the way an undertow begins, quietly, beneath a surface that looks almost inviting. There is no marker, no visible warning. Only the sense that the water has changed temperature around your ankles.

So yes, the room is dark. And I don’t like the dark. It makes everything worse. It makes my thoughts louder. My chest tighter. I don’t trust the dark. It’s where the sad things grow. And I guess that’s what this is. Sadness. Or sickness. Or both. I don’t know anymore.

She cleaned compulsively, paced, whispered, and corrected details no one else noticed. Floors were rewetted and polished. Objects aligned, realigned. Her mind circled endlessly, inventing betrayals, neglect, and slights. The rituals never calmed her. They only prolonged the sense that something remained unfinished.

The house I lived in was not made of wood or stone. It was built from expectation and inheritance, from silence arranged as order, from rituals passed down like furniture no one ever questioned.

I was not trying to solve anything. I was trying to feel without editing. The body knows before the mind does. Art gave me a way to listen.

When we hear the words mental illness, an image usually arrives before thought. It happens quickly, almost involuntarily: a figure in a hospital corridor, a television character speaking to no one in particular, a headline that links instability with danger and offers fear as an explanation.

We often speak about leadership in terms of resilience, output, and strategy. Rarely do we speak about wholeness. Yet no one can pour from an empty nervous system. No one can outrun biology with ambition.

Speech contorts. Lies dress themselves as truth. Truth folds in on itself. Every day, we encounter people speaking in contradictions, in promises that are nothing, and in our own lives, consequences spiral, rules twist, and forces pull us along that we cannot name or resist.