I Did Not Come Back From Hell With Empty Hands

In August 2026, I start my doctoral program in Counseling Psychology at the University of Northern Colorado. Ten years ago this same year, I was diagnosed with Bipolar I disorder with psychotic features. Ten years ago this same year, an honors advisor told me I wasn’t cut out for psychology, that I should switch to a human services major they considered “less demanding and complex.” I dropped out, but that wasn’t the end of the story.

Before

I grew up food insecure in rural Arkansas, in the early aughts, when mental health was not a thing anyone in my world had words for. My father changed jobs erratically and money was always short; whatever was happening inside him was never discussed. My mother was explosive and abusive. She lost her job as a teacher after reports that she’d abused a child. It was not a good childhood, and there was no mental healthcare on anyone’s radar to make sense of it.

From the outside, I looked like a straight-A kid with a 4.2 GPA who had never once been in trouble. I was a photographer with a real eye for portraits and weddings. I baked pies and read constantly. I took figure skating lessons and sang in an a cappella show choir. Entirely normal, by every visible measure.

What nobody knew (what nobody could have known) was that bipolar disorder ran in my family line, unnamed. As a teenager I had bouts of depression and watched my sleep slip later and later, night by night, until I was nearly nocturnal. In retrospect, these were the first early tremors of something no one around me could read. Through all of it, the person who actually raised me was my grandmother. She was my mother and my father both.

The Confrontation

When I was 18, my grandmother died. I left Arkansas for Texas to study psychology, carrying a grief I had no idea what to do with.

I didn’t last a semester before I broke down in a nurse practitioner’s office on campus — confused and frightened by my own impulsivity, my risk-taking, my experimenting with substances, my collapsing grades. I had almost entirely stopped eating and sleeping. That was where the diagnosis came: bipolar disorder.

The first medications didn’t work for me. I had no provider I could actually collaborate with, the dosing was wrong, and the side effects were brutal enough that I stopped taking anything at all. That noncompliance put me in and out of the hospital. And it wasn’t only the illness. It was the grief of losing the woman who raised me, layered over post-traumatic stress from my parents’ abuse, layered over fresh homophobic abuse after I came out as queer. My family hounded me day and night with harassing phone calls and texts about my lifestyle, which I drowned out with substances each time another flashback washed over me. The depersonalization and derealization that characterized those days made things like driving feel more like a terrifying video game. I attempted suicide. My nights were owned by night terrors, dreams of my childhood on a loop, PTSD at full volume. Roommates were frightened of me, and I did not think I would live to see 25.

That was my life until 2020.

In March 2020, in the first strange days of COVID, I slipped into psychosis. Paranoid delusions of surveillance. Running barefoot through the streets. A 72-hour hold. But this time I landed in front of a team that saw exactly what was happening to me: mania escalating into psychosis. They moved incredibly fast, building a precise regimen instead of guessing.

And slowly, it worked. I began to tell the difference between reality and delusion. I watched the world tilt back into balance and felt my own mind come back online. That was the hinge my whole life turned on. For the first time I understood that my brain would work again! I simply needed the right medication. I never stopped taking it after that. Not once.

After

Once I was steady, I started doing the things I’d been told I never would.

I got certified as a Court Appointed Special Advocate, because I finally understood how deeply my own childhood abuse and neglect had shaped me. I spent two years making sure eight different children never got lost in the system during their long, grinding legal cases. I took work in residential treatment programs at large academic psychiatric hospitals. I became a peer support specialist on a Mobile Crisis Outreach Team (the people who come out when you call 988). I worked as a peer in a PTSD clinic using Cognitive Processing Therapy.

Along the way I held the hands of suicidal people. I cried with grieving mothers. I sat with people in psychosis and helped them settle. I made a blind solo mom with OCD feel less alone. I met families and teenagers at the very ends of their ropes, and I helped people get sober. That’s only scraping the surface. Most recently, my PTSD work put me across the table from a survivor of ICE detention who had endured, for months on end, things most of us can only imagine. Bearing witness to that trauma made it undeniable: this work is more urgent than ever, and my lived experience and belief in the inherent dignity of every human being that I bring to it matter more than ever in this moment.

To some people it might have looked like job-hopping. It wasn’t. I was always moving forward, always taking the next rung up, learning the entire way, because I knew it was building toward something bigger.

In August 2024, I decided I was done working entry-level jobs in a field I loved and had dedicated my life to. I went back to finish my BS in psychology while working 40-hour, emotionally strenuous weeks in mental health and human services. I was studying through spring, summer, fall, and winter, with no family behind me except my husband, who held down our whole household and never once doubted I’d get there. Then, with all the hope I could muster, I applied to my dream PhD program. One application. It was a big swing, a full send. But I got in! I’m now studying Counseling Psychology at UNCO, with a minor in statistics and research methods. With time, I’ll have the privilege of learning and becoming the expert in the room; I will be able to speak to every single thing I lived through, only this time backed up with public health statistics and citations.

It’s been suggested to me, more than once, that I should keep these facts secret — especially in my line of work. I don’t fear that anymore. As Audre Lorde taught us, “Nothing I accept about myself can be used to diminish me.”

So if there’s anyone reading this who feels like they’ve lost their mind and will never get it back: you are on my mind every single day. I will never stop fighting for you and may the way I fight always serve as a reminder that your deepest pain can be metabolized into your life’s highest calling.

I did not come back from hell with empty hands.