A Sneak Peek into Her Thorns Book

Simone had a two-week stay in the psychiatric wing of the hospital. When I visited her, it felt like I had entered a prison. The staff made me lock my belongings up, and I wasn’t allowed to have anything on me. I heard screams echoing down the hall from a woman refusing sedation. People stared at me as if I had two sets of eyes. I heard people talking to themselves and saw them rocking back and forth. It felt like I had just stepped onto a movie set. 

I immediately thought that Simone didn’t belong there. She didn’t seem to have severe mental health issues like the other patients. Simone wasn’t hearing things or hallucinating anymore. She wasn’t having rapid mood swings or threatening to harm herself again. She seemed to be okay. But that wasn’t the case. Simone, just like Zoie, felt so much sorrow that she wanted to take her own life. 

By this time, my immediate family was the topic of gossip within our extended family. Everyone commented negatively on my sisters’ suicide attempts and my mother’s parenting. My family never openly discussed mental health issues, so misunderstandings and rumors spread like wildfire. Even after these incidents, we never discussed it. We went on with life as normal.

For a while, I couldn’t wrap my head around the trauma I experienced with my sisters. I didn’t have answers to any of the questions that lingered in my head. As a big sister, I felt I could have done a better job at seeing the signs and getting them help before they attempted to take their own lives. I blamed myself, but I also didn’t understand what would make a person feel like they didn’t want to live anymore, especially when they had so much to live for — until it was me in their shoes. 

As counterintuitive as it sounds, healing hurts. It hurts before it does anything else. This is equally true for emotional wounds as it is for physical ones. When you get a cut, the first thing you feel is pain. The cut is the first step of healing. Without the cut and the pain, there would be nothing to heal or restore. We can try to avoid or run away from pain, but it has a funny way of showing back up if you don’t deal with it the first time. Furthermore, it has an ugly way of manifesting in even worse forms than before. I would know.

Healing forces you to look at what’s broken, and it’s confusing. Some days it seems like rainbows and puppies; other days, it looks like a snotty nose and a tear-soaked pillow from crying so much your head hurts. One more thing about healing? If you actively seek it, you’ll find it. 

When my therapist, Ava, diagnosed me with clinical depression, anxiety, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), I felt numb. Though the diagnosis finally put language to what I had been feeling for years, something about it felt uncomfortable. I thought only veterans struggled with PTSD, but I was wrong. People with PTSD look just like me. 

I also thought depression was for ungrateful people. I used to be one of those “it could be worse” people. I thought about the children starving around the world or even families with food insecurity who lived up the street. I had all my necessities and then some. So how could I possibly be depressed? I think I’ve known for a while that I struggled with depression, but that didn’t stop me from feeling guilty about the actual diagnosis. And clearly, it ran in my family.

My single mother raised two of my sisters and me in a Christian home. We followed the same weekly routine growing up: Church, school, repeat. We didn’t talk about mental health, and we didn’t have conversations about our emotions. My voice, opinions, and concerns weren’t honored in my home, so this led to many pinned-up feelings and silent cries. 

Growing up, struggling with mental illness meant you were dramatic and ungrateful. I would not have dared express that I was sad because what do kids have to be sad about? This was the thought process around mental illness in my home and community. This is especially true for black children, and it tragically follows them into adulthood. 

So, I sat there in therapy with utter confusion scribbled all over my face because I couldn’t believe I was there, but I chose to seek healing despite my ignorance and reservations. To say I had a few bumps and bruises is an understatement. I think being run over by a car and then backed over four times was a more accurate description of how I felt. As I sat there on Ava’s couch, I kept thinking about how I didn’t want to be there. If I’m being completely honest, I went into therapy thinking, “yay healing,” but then I quickly realized it wasn’t going to be easy or cheerful at all. It was going to be painful, hard, and ugly. Most of us prefer to run in the opposite direction of pain. Therapy was forcing me to dive right in headfirst. 

This was the first time I had ever experienced someone allowing me to talk about my pain. I never had professional help before. I never thought I needed professional help. After all, I was the child and sister who “had it all together.” 

I was the one people came to when they needed help. I was the one who usually always told everyone she was fine when the tears on her pillow told a much different story. I was broken, and a series of unfortunate events led me to where I was sitting that day — on my therapist’s couch. Ava, my therapist, told me that my feelings were okay. As cliche as it sounds, hearing that my feelings were okay gave me a sense of hope I had never experienced before. 

In our initial session, I held back a lot. I guess my facial expressions told the truth that my lips were too afraid to say. Ava, being skilled at her job, noticed that I wasn’t expressing everything. I’ve never been good at controlling my facial expressions, so I’m not surprised they ratted me out. My eyes reflected the feelings I tried to suppress, and Ava called them out.

With that, she helped free me from the prison of other people’s opinions. It was just Ava and me there, so I had nothing to fear. I didn’t realize how much I made myself small to make others feel comfortable until I started therapy. I always stayed quiet about my hurt and let it eat me alive instead. Growing up, I was labeled as an “overly sensitive child.” So, I was taught very early on that I couldn’t be honest about what hurt me. I feared being called dramatic.

“I’m afraid of being too much for people if I let everything out,” I told Ava, trying to divert my eyes. I felt so embarrassed.

“And how has that been working for you? Keeping all your emotions in?” Ava asked me sincerely.

Her question pierced my heart and felt like a smack in the face, though I knew she didn’t mean for it to hurt. It stung because we both knew the truth about why I was on her couch in the first place. I had tried to take my own life because “keeping everything in” became too much, and I didn’t want to bear it anymore.

“Not good,” I told her. “Not good at all.”