Four Years of Better
A letter to the version of me who couldn't imagine surviving this long
Today marks 4 years since I tried killing myself.
I’m sitting with that number, and it feels both impossibly long and like yesterday at the same time.
Earlier this week, I sat with a client who looked so frustrated and hurt. Frustrated with the system. She said that’s why she can’t trust anyone and I just saw how much pain she was in. She just laid there cuddling her plushie. Then she introduced me to her plushie and said it was her dog and she liked him because he was weighted.
That moment—her small bid for connection after expressing such deep hurt—it got me thinking about my own journey. About how far I’ve come.
I used to be this jealous person. Was never happy with what I had. For so long this deep jealousy ran me. Now I know deep down it was this need for belonging, but the person I was then? I don’t like her at all.
Now I have this warmth that feels so natural to me and I’m trying to reconcile that they are the same person.
The army was supposed to be my proving ground. The place where I’d finally be enough. But I got injured during basic training—a physical failure that felt like proof of something deeper, something I’d feared my whole life: that I wasn’t strong enough, disciplined enough, worthy enough.
I see someone who was so humiliated by that injury—by “failing” at the one thing that was supposed to save her—that she would do anything to stay connected to that life. Including being in relationships that were detrimental to her wellbeing. At times even her physical wellbeing. I stayed because leaving felt like admitting the failure was real. I stayed because maybe if I could just get back to that lifestyle, I could prove it was all a mistake. That I wasn’t weak.
That got me stuck in that cycle for almost 6 years.
It wasn’t until about three years ago that I realized that it didn’t have to be the life for me. That it had proven to me—over and over—that it wasn’t the life for me. But even then I told myself maybe I’d come back as an officer with my master’s degree and “prove” myself.
Then one day I asked myself: “Why do I even want this? What’s the objective? I can do so many other things. The options are limitless.”
That question changed everything.
I also see someone who was misdiagnosed with depression, medicated for depression while actually being bipolar, which sent me into this almost 6-year long hypomanic phase. The medications meant to help were making me worse—more impulsive, more reckless, more desperate. Not until grad school did I see a psychiatrist who misdiagnosed me with BPD—which made sense at the time with my need to people please, be in bad relationships, but also the bipolar symptoms like impulsivity.
The impulsivity is the part that matters here. Because when you’re someone who already feels like they’re not enough, who’s spent years trying to prove their worth, and then your brain chemistry makes you act before you can think—it’s a dangerous combination.
Today marks 4 years since the worst night.
I was at a Halloween party with my boyfriend at the time. We’d been together for almost 2 years. I saw something I shouldn’t have seen—evidence that I wasn’t the only one, that I was being betrayed while I smiled and pretended everything was fine. And in that moment, it felt like the world collapsed.
I was drunk. Got home and took an entire bottle of Xanax. Just impulsively I did that and almost died.
I called my best friend. She lives in Germany. I was saying I missed her and why did she leave me. She called my boyfriend who thankfully was an EMT (and I’m forever grateful to him for that, despite everything that came after) and took me to the hospital.
That’s when I was diagnosed with BPD. Treatment is similar to bipolar, so I started getting better then.
Then came New York. My first job after graduation. Community-based work I loved—until July, when a client assaulted me during a home visit. I thought I knew what to expect. I didn’t. After that, I stopped leaving my house except to walk my dog. My car sat in the same parking space for months. And just when I was starting to find my footing again, my medication—the lithium that was supposed to stabilize me—turned toxic. Six times the therapeutic dose in my blood. My body shook and jerked and seized at all random times of the day until I couldn’t walk anymore. Until I had to be carried.
Another kind of death.
If I could talk to her—to the me of four years ago—I want to say that it gets so much better.
So much fucking better.
Even through all of this from last year, it only strengthened my power in myself. That we will be happy even if happy doesn’t look like what she thought. That we will be strong and powerful even through the worse days because there’s still a lot of worse days to come.
But here’s the thing: happy doesn’t look like what she thought.
I love myself. I believe in myself. I have confidence in my relationships because I know my worth and what I’m willing and not willing to stay for. I have my own space, I have a job I love, I have a business I love.
I have this deep sense of balance within myself that when something happens it only makes me wobble a little bit before I come back stronger.
I have my pets. I have deep connections even if few.
The strength I have now—it feels natural.
For years I felt so fucking weak. I heard it every day from my ex-husband. The way he said my name like it was an accusation. The way my needs were always an inconvenience, my pain always too much.
I remember asking him to bring me my medication after getting my wisdom teeth removed. I was in pain, swollen, barely able to speak. He was watching anime. He got mad that I interrupted. He picked up the medication bottle and threw it in my face and said “HERE YOU GO.”
I stayed. I apologized. I made myself smaller.
That’s what “weak” actually felt like. Not the physical pain—the fact that I accepted it. That I believed I deserved it. That I thought needing help meant I was a burden.
I’m no longer that person who accepts that.
When someone asked me how this strength feels different from the kind of strength I was trying to prove to others before, I couldn’t really explain it.
I think natural really is the best response. It just comes to me because that’s who I am.
This natural confidence shows up everywhere now. It shows up in how I walk my dog at sunset and don’t need anyone to validate the peace I feel. It shows up in how I set boundaries without apologizing for them. It shows up in my work—sitting with clients in their pain, like I did earlier this week, without losing myself in it. It shows up in how I take care of my inner child, how I journal, how I choose rest over productivity, how I build a business around the exact support I wish I’d had.
It’s a striking evolution from someone who spent years trying to prove herself to people who would never see her worth no matter what she did.
Four years ago marks a significant turning point in my story—a symbolic death of an old self and the beginning of a profound journey back to my own warmth and truth.
The person who stands here today is fundamentally different. I’ve cultivated an unshakeable self-trust that allows me to take criticism without it dismantling me, because I know who I am and what I stand for.
I’ve moved from seeking validation to creating genuine impact.
I think about all the versions of me that had to exist to get here. The jealous one. The cold one. The people-pleasing one. The one who stayed in bad relationships. The one who thought the army defined her worth. The one who swallowed a bottle of pills.
I’m trying to hold space for all of them with the same compassion I offer my clients. They were all doing their best with what they had.
And now I have so much more. Not because I earned it or proved myself worthy—but because I finally stopped trying to.
I gave myself permission to just be. To take up space. To need what I need without apology. To love what I love without shame. To be warm instead of cold. To be myself instead of who I thought I should be.
The warmth that feels so natural to me now is the result of four years of dedicated healing, self-discovery, and the courageous act of letting an old self die so a truer one could be born.
I am entering this next phase of my life truly being unapologetically myself.
And to the me of four years ago, the one who lay in that hospital bed thinking it was the end: I see you. I see how much pain you were in. I see how you couldn’t imagine a future where you felt anything but that crushing weight. I see how you thought you’d always be too much and never enough.
Thank you for surviving. Thank you for calling your best friend even through the fog. Thank you for holding on just long enough for this future to become possible. Thank you for not giving up on us, even when giving up felt like the only option left.
You couldn’t see it then, but you were always heading here. Every moment of pain, every humiliation, every time you got back up when everything in you wanted to stay down—it was all leading here. You were always going to make it through. You were always going to find your way home to yourself.
Four years later, I’m not the same person who almost died on a Halloween night. I’m not the person who believed she was weak. I’m not the person who needed external validation to know she mattered.
I’m someone who knows that messy healing is still healing. That wobbling doesn’t mean falling. That needing support doesn’t mean being a burden. That warmth isn’t weakness—it’s the strongest thing I’ve ever built.
This is what better looks like.
And it’s so much more than I ever imagined.