“I knew if I stayed where I was, nothing would get better; nothing would change. If I wanted to ease the pain, I had to try something different.”

“The pain had to be great enough for me to accept my reality, to hope that something different, and hopefully better, was out there and to do whatever came next to reach that point. It seems clear and simple when I write it down on paper. But I also know just because something is simple, it does not mean it is easy.”

“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 remember thinking I wanted to die rather than live through another February day of grayness; I didn’t tell anyone because I knew it wasn’t normal. And normal was all I ever wanted to be.”

“I wanted to live more than I wanted to die. I didn’t know how to live. I didn’t know how I would be able to live life on life’s terms. But I know God carried me to the end of that journey so I could start a new one. In those few days, God brought me to the point of willingness again, to start down a path with an unknown destination.”

“Why did I want to die? Because living was just so damn hard, even at age 10. When all I had to do was get up in the morning and go to school, it was more than drudgery; it was excruciating.”

“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.”