Grow Your Mental Health

My Journey Toward Mental Health Sometimes in helping others to heal, you have to expose the deepest parts of your soul to make a connection. It’s a vulnerable act and one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever done. For most of my life, I hid my true self from the world. I put up a shield to protect myself, to ensure no one could use my vulnerabilities against me, or have “ammunition” to bring me down. It wasn’t until recently that I realized this instinctive self-concealment was a trauma response, rooted in something that happened when I was eight years old. Enter Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD). CPTSD didn’t come alone. It dragged a whole entourage of unsavory characters along with it. Villains like low self-esteem, self-doubt, self-loathing, and a profound awkwardness in social situations. I became hyper-focused on pleasing others, desperately seeking approval, while ignoring my own needs. This relentless effort often left me feeling even more anxious and disconnected, especially during those moments when my emotions overwhelmed me and I found myself spiraling out of control. To cope, I buried myself in work, convinced that if I worked hard enough, I could make myself indispensable. I knew I was being exploited, but my fear of speaking up for myself kept me undervalued and underpaid. The harder I pushed, the closer I edged toward burnout. Eventually, I found an unexpected lifeline, a job deep in the bush next to the ocean, far from the chaos of cities and the weight of my own expectations. It was there, surrounded by the vast beauty of nature, that I felt truly at peace for the first time. The call of the birds in the trees, wild animal encounters almost every day, and the utter wonder of the underwater world gave me space to breathe and reconnect with myself and nature. It was also in this place that I made some lifelong friends. Nature didn’t cure everything, I still experienced moments of dysregulation, but it offered me a sanctuary, a sense of healing I’d never known before. Interestingly, this transformative time wasn’t what directly inspired this book. That memory surfaced later as I was writing and began piecing together the connections. But it’s clear in my mind how that time in nature helped me to reconnect with myself. When It All Started I lost one year, an entire year, of my childhood. There’s a blank space in the timeline of my life. When I was eight, my father got promoted, and our family moved to the suburbs outside a large city. My younger brother and I attended a school there for one year, but I have no memory of it. Whatever happened there is unknown to my conscious mind. When I try to recall those days, there’s nothing but an empty void, a haze of white noise. No faces, no friends, no memories, just a disconcerting absence.