“I did the only thing I knew how to do: I built my own walls of silence to disguise my desperation and what later came to be recognized and diagnosed as depression.”

“I thought by masking the depression with silence, the feelings might disappear.”

“By first grade, my sense of worth was in direct proportion to what I learned and what I contributed back to the class. I had already become a human doing instead of a human being.”

“This is where life as I knew it changed. This is where a new feeling slowly, eventually, permeated every cell of my body, changing the way I took in the world. My perceptions, opinions, everything changed the year I moved from Texas to Virginia.”

“I had to clear up my messy life. By letting go of the debris and filth, I have come to a deeper, more soulful beauty and clarity like an oasis in the desert. From that place of clarity, a vision of what I could have, what I could do, who I could be has emerged if I allow my heart to become a place of compassion, acceptance and forgiveness.”

“Through each crisis in my life, with acceptance and hope, in a single defining moment, I finally gained the courage to do things differently.”

“I thought that day was the end of my life. It was the end of the world as I knew and understood it. I was taking another step into the unknown, again, onto a path unknown, grappled with fear and anxiety.”