Prologue
From an early age, I learned that the world had sharp edges. When I was eight years old, I lost my grandfather which made a giant hole in my heart. But also, my biological father walked out of my life, leaving a silence in our house that felt heavier than furniture. At eight, you don’t understand the mechanics of addiction. You don’t understand that a chemical can hijack a parent’s brain until a daughter becomes a secondary thought. All I knew was the quiet, haunting math of childhood logic: If he left, I must have done something wrong. If he doesn’t love me, I must not be worth loving.
On Sundays, my mom took me to church. I grew up in the pews, surrounded by the scent of old hymnals, damp wood, and the comforting, predictable rhythm of children's church and later, youth group worship. We sang songs about an unconditional, unchanging Father who would never leave nor forsake us. I tried hard to believe it. But on Monday mornings, when the front door stayed closed and my biological father remained gone, the human void sometimes spoke louder.
To cope with the silence, I found a different kind of sanctuary.
Food became my truest friend. Unlike people, it was entirely predictable. When a wave of sadness hit me, the pantry was always open. When anxiety made my chest tight, a warm meal loosened it. When anger bubbled up, eating quieted the storm. My mom saw what was happening and gently tried to intervene, taking me to therapy to unpack the grief of the abandonment. But the therapist’s office felt like a place where I had to look at my wounds. Food was a shield. In my narrow, childhood view, food was the only thing that didn’t hurt me. It didn’t reject me. It didn’t package up its clothes and drive away.
But the shield came with a heavy cost. By the time I hit elementary school, the emotional eating had made me noticeably overweight. In the brutal social ecosystem of the schoolyard, that made me an easy target. The bullying was severe and relentless. Kids can spot a lack of confidence from a mile away, and they weaponized my size against me. I was excluded from games, whispered about in hallways, and teased until my face burned with shame.
The cruel irony was that the bullying only drove me deeper into my coping mechanism. When the kids at school rejected me, I ran straight back to the only friend that never judged. Food didn’t tease me. Food didn’t call me names.
By the time I transitioned into middle school, the overt teasing and bullying began to fade away, replaced by something almost worse: invisibility. The kids stopped shouting insults, but the damage to my psyche was already permanently cemented. My self-esteem was a flatline. My self-hatred was an internal monologue that never took a break, convincing me I had zero self-worth.
The one bright point in my life growing up was my home. My mom was a single mom and I was also raised by my grandmother. She'd take care of when my mom had to work. My home was my safe haven. But the world was dark.
By the time I turned thirteen, the heavy cloud of depression had officially settled over my life. It wasn’t just a bad mood or a phase; it was a suffocating weight that made even waking up feel like a chore. The zero self-worth and self-hatred I carried from the bullying had metastasized into something much darker. I felt entirely alone in my pain, trapped inside a broken mind. One afternoon, unable to carry the burden by myself anymore, I poured my despair onto a piece of paper. I wrote a note to a friend, confessing a truth I had kept hidden from the world: I wanted to kill myself.
I handed her the note, half-hoping she would understand, but mostly just needing to scream into the void. She did the bravest thing a friend could do. Instead of keeping my secret, she took the note straight to the school counselor.
I didn’t know what had happened behind the scenes that day. I took the bus home just like any other afternoon, completely unaware that my world was about to shift. When I walked through the front door, the silence of the house was broken by a sound that tore through me. My mom was sobbing. It wasn’t just crying; it was the deep, gut-wrenching weep of a mother facing her worst nightmare. The school had called her. She knew.
Looking back, that painful afternoon saved my life. I was immediately admitted into a local children’s psychiatric inpatient facility.
To many, the idea of a mental health hospital sounds terrifying, but for me, it was the best thing that could have ever happened. The moment I stepped through those doors, the crushing isolation I had carried for years began to fracture. For the first time in my life, I looked around and saw kids just like me. Some were fighting severe depression; others were battling different mental health struggles born from their own unique heartbreaks. But we all shared the same invisible heavy armor.
In that facility, I learned the most life-changing lesson a hurting teenager can learn: I was not alone.
Our days were structured around healing. We went to group therapy, sitting in circles where we could speak our darkest thoughts without fear of judgment or rejection. I had individual counseling sessions where professional hands gently began to unpack the trauma of my father’s abandonment and the scars left by the bullies. And, for the first time, I was put on medication to balance the chemicals in my brain. It wasn’t magic, but it gave me a foothold. Slowly, the fog began to lift, and the medication did exactly what it was meant to do—it gave me enough light to stop wanting to die.
I went into that hospital feeling entirely broken, but I left with something I hadn’t possessed in years: a pulse of hope.
***
Watching the other girls, I convinced myself that there was only one cure for my brokenness: popularity.
I spent all of middle school, and nearly all of high school, consumed by a singular, aching dream. I wanted to be noticed. I wanted to be wanted. I would watch the popular girls congregate by the lockers—effortless, beautiful, and completely secure in their belonging. They had a language of their own. They called each other “babe” with an affectionate casualness that made my heart ache. “Hey babe!” “Oh my gosh, babe, did you see that?” Every time I heard it, a wave of longing washed over me. I wanted to be part of that circle. I wanted someone to look at me, look past the weight and the insecurity, and call me “babe” like I belonged.
In the twelfth grade, the universe finally shifted. The heavy velvet curtains parted, and my impossible dream actually came true.
But I would soon learn that standing in the spotlight comes with its own kind of darkness. It was nothing like I thought it would be. And before the year was over, the dream would end in tragedy.
