01 | The Breaking Point
Last year (and many of the years before that), my life looked polished on the outside. I was running big projects, carrying clients, managing my home and business. I had great relationships, responsibilities and leadership in my church. I was a hands-on mom, a great cook, and the go-to host for just about any event in my home.
But underneath, I was unraveling. Every “yes” I gave stretched me thinner. Every extra task pulled me further from myself. My body was screaming at me daily — it needed rest. The stress and anxiety were manifesting so much physically that I often questioned if I had cancer or some other life-changing diagnosis.
And yet, my anxiety caused avoidance. I refused to go to the doctor to ease my mind, because I was too scared to actually hear the words of this imagined diagnosis that I’d already decided was mine. That would make it real. So instead, I avoided, self-sabotaged, and essentially tortured myself.
I told myself I was strong enough to carry it all. I told myself this was what success and being a strong woman looked like. I ignored the signals — the fatigue that no amount of sleep could fix, the irritability coursing through my body, the constant crushing feeling of anxiety in my chest all day, every day.
I kept pushing. Until I quite literally couldn’t anymore. And then, finally, I broke.
In December, everything began to crack. I officially hit the breaking point I had spent years fearing. Unfortunately (and I guess luckily), I am very self-aware. I knew that I would break, and I feared it. I was actually terrified about it and would often use language like, “when I have a breakdown…” I voiced my fears whenever things felt like too much (which was often, but there were times when things truly felt impossible).
It wasn’t necessarily one dramatic moment — more like a slow collapse that finally left me on the floor, covered in blood from a self-inflicted wound, realizing I couldn’t keep going the way I had been. The exhaustion was bone-deep. I felt afraid of stopping but terrified of continuing. I didn’t know who I was without the overwork, without the constant chase for validation, recognition, and (somehow, always conditional) love — and that confusion was its own kind of grief.
Cutting myself to the extent that I did, for the first time in ten years, was the last cry for help I subconsciously felt I was able to give. I felt shame around the act. This was what had helped me survive from the ages of 11–22. How could I have fallen back into this, and so badly? I’m an adult. I have control and free will. And yet, I chose self-harm — something I believed I had healed from. What do I do from here? How come I couldn’t stop? Why did I feel absolutely no pain or release as I was hoping, needing?
I held on for about a week, quickly spiraling to rock bottom. It felt like being pushed out of a plane without a parachute (at least what I imagine it would feel like). Hitting the ground was inevitable. I felt out of control, and my body lived in terror, stuck in fight-or-flight. I began having diarrhea every day, all throughout the day. I eventually felt no emotions.
One morning, I FaceTimed my sister and asked her how far I should let this go on before really “breaking.” I felt myself slipping away, and in that moment, I knew I didn’t have much more in me before I lost myself. I feared that I would never “come back” the same — that the extent of the damage would be too extreme. I can’t fully explain how scary it is to feel like you may lose yourself and never return.
It was decided that I needed help immediately. I had lost my will to live and felt I had completely shut down. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t function. I couldn’t eat or sleep. I was losing huge chunks of time from dissociation. Everything was too much, and I felt it all the way to the core of my Self.
I am a very visual person, and for as long as I can remember I’ve processed hard things in images. What I saw in my mind — the image that my brain used to “explain” the danger I was in because of my vulnerable state from prolonged anxiety, stress, and missed diagnosis — was of what I knew to be my spirit, my Self, leaving my body and never being able to enter again, stuck in limbo, tormented as I tried to get back to the vessel where I belonged.
I would close my eyes and see myself sitting against a wall, screaming so loudly that I felt my vocal cords strain, my blood vessels pop from the force and longevity. And yet, I was alone. No one could hear me. No one saw the never-ending pain, the feeling of unsafety, confusion, lack of memory, and every other symptom that my body was desperately trying to use as an alarm.
I was taken to the ER. Somehow it was decided that I could speak for myself in these moments. I sat in a hallway for 10 hours and at 10 p.m. was taken to a psychiatric facility where I was strip searched and put in a room with what looked like a man sleeping in the bed next to me. I was handed a paper bag and led to a bed that was essentially a plastic seat cushion.
I thought I had done plenty of hard things in my mere 31 years of living, but I realized that I was entering into something new — something extremely hard. The hardest I’d ever experienced. This is where my story shifts. This was the moment when the life I had been living ended — and the long, slow work of becoming began.
