Content warning: discussions of suicidality, mental health, and survival.

There is a place inside me where certain words come from.

It is the same place the lines came from when I wrote:

If the sky turns grey
I promise now I will stay.

Those words were not poetry first.
They were truth.

When I look back at my life, I see a younger version of myself in fragments.
A woman walking through the world already exhausted by it.

Dark circles under her eyes.
Drinking to steady herself before facing the day.
Crying until there were no tears left.

There were nights she begged the universe to let her go.
Moments when she felt like she was already dead inside.

But every morning she woke up again.

For decades.

Blow after blow came, and still she stood up to face another day.

Once, sitting in front of a psychiatrist, she said something that frightened even herself.

“I will die at fifty if my life does not change before then.”

She meant it.

Not because she wanted death, but because living like that was unbearable.

And yet she stayed.

Because people depended on her.
Because leaving would hurt them more.
Because somewhere deep inside she still believed life might change.

The hardest thing in life is not dying.

The hardest thing is continuing when you desperately want the pain to stop.

Then came one of the greatest tests of my life.

My daughter tried to take her life three times in three months.

The pain of that moment is impossible to describe.
I believed I had failed her.
I believed she had seen too much suffering in me.

But the truth is different.

We were failed.

For decades I begged for answers.
For support.
For someone to see what was happening inside my mind.

Doctors did not listen.
Systems did not listen.

I was surviving without the tools I needed.

When my daughter suffered, it did not make me give up.

It made me fight harder.

Because I knew exactly what that darkness felt like.

And then, just one month after her final attempt, my mother tried to take her own life twice.

At the time I felt anger.

It felt like the world was collapsing around me.

Now I understand it differently.

Pain spreads through families in ways we do not always see.

Still, I stayed.

I have sat with pills and water in my hands.

I have stood at that edge more than once.

But something inside me always stopped.

Something stubborn.

Something that refused to let the storm win.

My turning point came when I was finally diagnosed with autism and ADHD.

My life depended on that understanding.

For the first time I knew why everything had been so hard.

Now I look back at the younger version of myself and I feel two things at once.

Grief.
And power.

Grief for how much she endured without help.

Power because she never stopped fighting for answers.

And now I live differently.

I booked a holiday to see puffins after not leaving home overnight for twenty years.

To some people that might sound small.

To me, it is monumental.

It is proof that life can grow again after surviving.

I live unapologetically now.

When sadness returns — and it still does — I remind myself how far I have come.

I look at my little puffin toy and I say:

“We are going to see the puffins.

The younger version of me could not imagine doing that.

But she is glad I can.

Life is fragile.
Storms still come.

But I am no longer afraid of them.

Because I know something now that I did not know then.

I am a survivor.

I will walk through the flames if I must.

And I will come alive again.

Every single time.

— Frost ❄️