Where do I even begin? I have never written anything like this before. Nor have I ever posted to a forum. I don’t even know where to start, but I suppose, like every story, you should start at the beginning. I’ll call this “The Very Recent Destruction of What was My Life.”

This all started on Valentine’s Day when my ex-girlfriend (who I thought was the love of my life) broke up with me via a text message. That’s not a joke. She really did that. Naturally, my heart was completely shattered. This had come at the most inconvenient of times too. I was in my clinical rotations of PA (grad) school. At that point, I was exhausted and living on auto pilot. My routine was a daily 10-12 hour shift followed by studying, sleeping as much as I could, and waking up to repeat this on an already empty gas tank. I had no friends, my eating habits were a joke, and I woke up hating my life everyday. Mentally, I was being beaten down every other shift by senior residents and the attending doctors. The weight of that break up and how it was conducted drove me over the edge I was barely hanging onto. The next thing I knew, I was being admitted to an inpatient psychiatric facility for suicidal ideations, depression, anxiety and work related exhaustion. All the while, my grades begin to slip and I was placed on academic hold. Over the next few months, I saw numerous therapists and psychiatrists and started taking a combination of antidepressants just to stabilize myself. It was during that time, amidst the chaos, that I realized my life was on a track that I never intended it to be on and I was utterly lost. I had no purpose. Hell, I am still figuring it out.

Here are 3 things I actually wrote and posted online throughout all of this in the hopes that someone would see and help me. How? I don’t know. But I felt that empty and desperate enough that I wasn’t even embarrassed anymore to share my pain.

1. To my ex: I wanted to be your wife. I wanted to be the mother of your child. I wanted you to want me. I wanted to be enough. I wanted you to fight for me.

2. Describing my anxiety: I feel so sick. My heart literally hurts. I want to throw up. I’m not okay. My emotions are so overwhelmingly strong I can’t handle anything. I’m just so sad. I wish I could shoot myself in the chest and kill my heart so I wouldn’t have to feel everything so intensely. Why am I like this? There is something wrong. This is crippling. People shouldn’t feel this sick inside. I feel so weak. There are moments where it feels hard just to breathe, just to be, because feeling alive is so painful. I feel terrified in those moments and I just want to run away to be in complete solitude. I feel like I’m going to die, that’s how scared I feel. I feel like I can’t move. I feel paralyzed

3. What the hell have I been doing? : I’m 27 years old and I’m realizing that I have never truly been happy. My life is at the most significant crossroad I’ve ever encountered. I’ve just given up the security of a good job and a safe routine. I don’t even know what the next day will bring. My life is essentially a giant mess right now. And I have been programmed by society to fear all of the uncertainty that I’m about to face. Everything that I’ve come to believe as being the truth just feels like a big lie. I feel like I’ve wasted my life, being stuck on autopilot, not knowing what I want or who I am. And I am tired. I want to live. I want to be free and experience true beauty. I want to love, wholeheartedly and deeply, even recklessly. I want to travel. I don’t want to spend another second doing what people say I should do.

So here I am: a grad school dropout, single and continuing my uphill battle with depression and anxiety. I guess the point of me sharing this is to see if there are any people who have any advice as to what I should or what you did when you felt this lost. Or you could just share your story. I feel so alone

Recently I’ve taken steps to find myself. There are many dark days still, I will admit, but I’ve started to see that I’ve got to live for and love the most important person in my life — myself. I’ve been eating vegan for a month, started playing the ukulele, and I am trying my best to getting outside and do activities, mostly alone, but I have always been an earthy person who found serenity in solitude while amongst the elements…and it is a start, right?