Depression is so strange.
One day your body feels like it’s filled with lead, and you sleep for hours you can’t even remember. You wake up groggy, confused, eyes barely able to open, and yet still exhausted. The next day, or maybe even that same night, you’re wired, mind racing, heart pounding, and sleep is nowhere to be found. I was up late last night, my thoughts chewing through the silence, and now it’s early morning and I’m still awake. This is depression. It’s not just sadness, it’s a war within your own body and mind. You try to walk through the day like everything is fine, like you’re holding it together, but really, you feel like a ghost haunting your own life.
You function because you have to. You smile because people expect it. But inside, you’re crumbling.
And then come the people who think they understand.
They give you clichés: “You’ll be fine.” “Everyone goes through hard times.” “Just think positive.”
But how would they know? They didn’t live through my life. They didn’t sleep in fear as a child or wake up in chaos. They didn’t grow up trying to survive in a world that felt unsafe and unpredictable from the start. People say they’d handle things differently, but I don’t know many who would still be standing—let alone functioning—after what I’ve been through.
Sometimes I wonder how bad it really was, because there are parts of my childhood I’ve completely blocked out. It’s like a fog rolled in, thick and heavy, erasing everything too painful to carry. And now Tammy is gone. She was the only person who could look at me and say, “Remember?” She held the other half of the memory, my living proof that I wasn’t crazy, that those things really happened. Now all I have are the fragments. Shadows.
I’ve asked myself over and over: Why do we always focus on the negative?
Is it just easier? Or are there so few good moments that they get drowned out? For me, survival meant focusing on danger. I had to be alert. Hyper-aware. Ready. The good moments didn’t require that kind of attention, so they faded into the background while the trauma burned itself into my brain. I’ve spent years trying to heal, trying to unpack that pain, and yet it still creeps up behind me, especially when I think I’m finally okay.
My last breakdown wasn’t that long ago, just a couple of years. I remember sitting in a psychiatrist’s office, asking, “Why are these breakdowns happening more often now?”
All they said was, “You need to deal with the trauma at this stage of your life.”
I stared at them, completely lost.
What did that even mean? I always thought healing had a finish line. That one day, I’d wake up and the trauma would be gone, processed, buried, handled. But now I know that’s not true. Trauma doesn’t leave. It sleeps. It waits. It wakes up when you’re vulnerable and grabs you by the throat.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised it came back now. I’ve been through so much recently, fighting in court over my divorce, closing the door on a marriage that spanned nearly two decades, moving out of the home I lived in for 18 years. And then trying to process the unthinkable: that my ex-husband tried to kill me. Twice.
Yes, you heard that right. Twice.
The first time felt like something out of a horror movie.
I had returned to the farm to pick up my truck and trailer. Everything looked fine, the truck was parked out front like nothing had happened. I got in, started the engine, and let it warm up. It was a standard, and I remember shifting into gear like I had done a thousand times before. The gate opened, and I pulled out, heading toward the city.
Then I got to the train tracks.
I pressed the brakes. Nothing.
I pumped them, panicked, hoping it was just air in the lines, but there was nothing. My heart slammed in my chest. I scanned the tracks; left, right; thankfully, no train. But my mind spun with the question: What would I have done if one had been coming? I clenched the wheel, jackknifed the trailer, and forced the rig to stop. Then I turned around and brought it back to the farm.
That’s when I saw it. The brake lines had been cut, on both the truck and the trailer.
Seventeen years of marriage, and I never thought he was capable of that kind of cruelty. You don’t want to believe the person you loved would plan your death. It’s easier to think it was a mistake. A freak accident. But it wasn’t. It was deliberate.
And I didn’t report it. Not at first.
Because how do you walk into a police station and say, “I think my husband tried to kill me.”
It sounds insane. Until it happens again.
The second time was even worse.
The house’s water system had been drained, including the hot water tank. I had to rig up a new setup to get water flowing again, since we lived on a farm. I connected the pump, got everything in place, and flipped the power. The water started flowing, but something didn’t feel right. That gut feeling, the one you only get after surviving trauma—was screaming at me. So I kept checking the tank. Up and down the hallway, over and over. Something was wrong.
Then suddenly, water started spraying everywhere. I rushed to shut it off. And that’s when I saw it.
The ground wire to the hot water tank had been cut.
He tried to electrocute me.
I just stood there, dripping, stunned, and terrified. I asked myself, What did I do to deserve this? I couldn’t come up with a single answer. But I knew, I knew without a doubt, that I had been lucky again. Someone or something was watching over me that day, just like at the train tracks. My intuition had saved me. My instinct had kept me alive.
Experiences like these change you.
They chip away at your trust in people. You want to believe in the good, you try to, but now you know darkness can hide behind a smile. Maybe you’re like me. Maybe you’ve spent your life seeing the best in people, ignoring the red flags, convincing yourself it’s not that bad. But it is. And it was.
Now, I sit here, looking back on everything, trying to make sense of it all.
Trying to figure out where the pain ends and where I begin.
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