Mental illness almost took my life, but I’m a fighter.
I was born and raised in Detroit––the notorious Motor City that’s as famous for its crime as it is its cars. Some might describe the city as undergoing a renaissance. For me, Detroit will always exist as a lost American relic with shuttered, empty buildings and broken dreams.
My parents were able to pull us out of the cycle of poverty with my dad finding his way as a computer programmer and my mom going into banking. I was a straight A student whose love for writing would later become a lifeline.
Though our lives seemed great to the outside world, what people didn’t see was that my dad was struggling mentally, possibly with bipolar disorder. My mom couldn’t cope, so she withdrew. And I became angrier and angrier at myself for not being in control. Little did I know, this was the definition of depression: anger turned inward.
High school was another story. My peers considered me the Whitest Black kid you would ever meet—this deducts cool points when you live in the ghetto. And with my family being Jehovah’s Witnesses, I was ostracized even more. The only thing I could turn to was writing, which didn’t stop my depression from worsening. Truthfully, we didn’t even know that’s what I had. My family just thought I was hormonal and that Jehovah would save me.
It wasn’t until after my mom and I finally moved away from my dad that I ended up in an outpatient facility for self-mutilation. When that didn’t help, my mom and I were convinced that California would make us feel better. I was ready to shutter off my past for sunshine, abandoning it like the dilapidated homes I was used to seeing. But blue skies can’t beat the blues.
The pattern of me not fitting in persisted. Leave it to me to choose a small liberal arts school. There were students there who had never before seen a Black person.
I resorted to the same behavior as before: self-mutilating and writing. The latter would lead to my first book, The Willow Tree, even though writing still wasn’t enough to empty the emotional baggage.
By senior year of college, I would attempt suicide by overdose. I was placed in another outpatient facility, except now I was ready to heal. Writing became the perfect crutch to hobble on until I could stand on my own.
Now I’m here today, still standing, and writing is more than my crutch–it’s my trusty friend and advisor. And because of this loyal pal, I’ve now found myself the author of another book, The Millennial Mentality: More than Memes, Cats, and Mishaps and a T.V. pilot, all of my work relaying what it’s like to be Black, live with depression, and figure it all out from adolescence to adulthood.
