“Here’s the landscape. Here’s the word that almost worked.”
But only sometimes. I kept going long after the signs were telling me to stop—and that’s when everything unraveled. At the time, my life didn’t look broken. It looked transitional. That’s the word people use when they’re trying to stay hopeful. Transitional sounds temporary. Manageable. Like you’re still in control.
I moved to a quaint costal town on November 1st, a beautiful house I shared with Alex. It was big—big enough for four people to live comfortably, big enough to feel like stability. For a while, it was exactly that. I had space. I had plans. I had a sense that I was finally landing somewhere solid, with a good chance at a normal life.
Throughout the year that followed, I convinced myself it was what I wanted. Red flags kept being thrown on the field, but I ignored them and kept going.
The next year came in like a lamb, and with it, Alex’s new boyfriend. He moved in quietly, almost casually, as if permanence could be introduced without discussion. Supposedly, he had nowhere else to go. Supposedly, it was temporary. Supposedly, it wouldn’t change anything.
But things always change.
What followed wasn’t a single explosion—it was erosion. Boundaries softened, then disappeared. Tension became background noise. I told myself I was being flexible, understanding, evolved. What I was really doing was ignoring the low hum of unease that had started to live in my body.
By the time I left that house, I was already unraveling. I just didn’t know it yet.
This isn’t a story about blame. It’s not about villains or heroes or neat timelines. It’s about what happens when momentum replaces clarity, when survival mode starts making decisions for you, and when the people you meet—often at your lowest—leave permanent fingerprints on your memory.
In the months that followed, my life compressed. Money became math I couldn’t make work. My car began to fail in expensive, humiliating ways. I chased fixes the way desperate people do—throwing money at problems I couldn’t afford to solve, convincing myself that the next repair, the next adjustment, the next good day would reset everything.
Instead, the pressure kept building.
There’s a strange confidence that comes with instability. A kind of manic certainty that says: I’ve got this. I always figure it out. I mistook that feeling for strength. I didn’t recognize it as a warning.
By the time I found myself inside a psychiatric unit, my life had shrunk to a schedule of meals, meds, and locked doors. And yet, as fate would have it, that’s where the world got bigger.
The psych ward introduced me to people I will never forget—people who were inconvenient, confusing, funny, frightening, tender, and painfully human. Some of them scared me. Some of them broke my heart. Some of them reflected parts of myself I wasn’t ready to see.
This blog is a record of that year—the incline, the crash, the psych ward, and the aftermath. It’s a portrait of a mind under pressure and a quiet study of the strange community that forms when everyone has fallen through their own rabbit hole.
I don’t claim clarity in every moment. I don’t offer redemption arcs neatly tied with bows. What I offer instead is truth as I experienced it: fragmented, darkly funny, uncomfortable, and, at times, unexpectedly compassionate.
This was my WTF year.
Not because everything went wrong all at once—but because I kept going long after the signs were telling me to stop.
Coming from a place where, I’m told, awareness is power,
K.
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I'm Still Here. Somehow... 