Beautifully Broken “The hardest challenge is to be yourself in a world where everyone is trying to make you be somebody else.” E.E. Cummings I remember feeling different when I started third grade, as though there was an impenetrable glass wall between myself and my peers. I could see them, I could hear them, but [...]
I Am Surely Dying... It truly amazes me how in the matter of just a few days, my body and my brain, can completely double cross me... A friend of mine recently posted how we are less than 200 days away from Christmas. This had me thinking about last Christmas and my immediate family that [...]
The sliver of light coming under the door of the windowless office seemed unbearably bright and offensive. I turned away from it and closed my eyes. In a few moments, I would be asleep again. I was supposed to be out seeing patients, but it was all I could do to show up at work [...]
Fighting the Deluge I have told my story more times than I care to count. It is a staple of rehab: you start at childhood and narrate through your addiction. You tell the sordid story of your suffering until you reach the heartwarming conclusion where everyone hears what you learned and how you are all [...]
Read part 1 here. Samantha soon warned me that in the not-so-distant future, she would possibly not be in contact with me for a few days, and I accepted it, because I loved her, and I knew it was something she had to do. She ended up breaking her promise, and I got to see [...]
I was asked to write this piece a couple weeks ago, and I started to write it quite a few times. I wrote some of it down here, and erased it. I wrote some elsewhere, and scrapped it. I wrote pages upon pages in my head, and tossed them aside, along with all the useless [...]
Survival by Katheryne Patterson It was at 18 that I discovered I had a family history of depression. There was Athie, my great grandmother who received shock treatments and was unable to care for her last child, my grandfather with a gun pressed against his temple, and the cousin who drowned himself in a creek [...]
The words jolted me to a frightening place I never want to re-visit. "You know with 100 percent certainty you won't be able to feel joy that day. That's the most profoundly damaging aspect of depression." Spoken by Canadian sportscaster Michael Landsberg in today's cover story in the Washington Post, "Unwell and unashamed," I felt [...]
I received a meme once from a friend that said “Someone’s therapist knows all about you” and it dawned on me how scarily accurate that probably was. I’ve left quite the wake in my 37 years of life and not all of it has been sunshine and roses. The majority of my life, save the [...]
I was raised to believe slaves were the only black people who had the right to be depressed. So when I stayed in my bedroom for days at a time, silent and suicidal, my family’s encouragement was that “things could be worse.” If my ancestors survived slavery with no mental health treatment, then I certainly [...]
