When I was fifteen years old, I was hospitalized for the first time.

I remember being terrified.

I remember feeling confused.

I remember not understanding what was happening to me.

The police came to my home after I threatened myself with my stepfather’s firearm. That day changed everything. My stepfather was arrested, and I found myself in my first adolescent psychiatric ward.

I remember the chipped paint on the walls. The cold beds. The uncertainty. I remember being scared and feeling completely out of place.

At the time, I was a very sheltered kid. I knew very little about the world outside of my home. My family was embarrassed by the situation and wanted me home as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, hospital staff were asking questions about the abuse that had been happening in my household.

Looking back, that first hospital was actually one of the better experiences I would have. I didn’t know it then, but many of the experiences that followed would eventually become the reason I created Unlock Psych.

Not long after that hospitalization, I was removed from my mother’s custody and entered foster care.

I was not prepared for what that transition would be like.

I know foster care helps some people, but for me it felt like being ripped away from everything familiar and dropped into a completely different world. Even though home was unsafe, it was what I knew. The foster home felt foreign. I felt lost, disconnected, and overwhelmed.

My self-harm worsened.

Eventually I injured myself severely enough to require medical treatment, and after receiving care I was placed on another psychiatric hold and hospitalized again.

That began a cycle that would continue for years.

I was moved from foster home to foster home and eventually into a group home. During that time I was hospitalized repeatedly. Sometimes for a few days. Sometimes for weeks at a time.

I was struggling so much that it felt like I barely experienced adolescence outside of hospitals, holds, and institutions.

The group home I lived in had twenty-one girls. I was overwhelmed almost constantly. I was hurting myself, suicidal, and unable to regulate the emotions I was carrying.

During those years I experienced things that still stay with me today.

I experienced restraint.

I experienced seclusion.

I experienced humiliation.

I experienced neglect.

I experienced being talked down to, dismissed, overmedicated, and treated as though my pain was a problem to be managed rather than something to be understood.

After months of repeated hospitalizations, I was eventually sent to a higher-level group home.

It was a locked facility.

Although it wasn’t technically a psychiatric hospital, much of it felt like one.

I spent my seventeenth birthday there.

Some of the experiences I had in that facility were among the most traumatic of my life. I remember being afraid of staff. I remember feeling powerless. I remember learning what it felt like to have other people make decisions about my life while my own voice seemed to matter less and less.

Eventually I was returned to my mother’s custody.

On the surface things appeared different, but many of the same challenges remained.

Throughout my late teens and into adulthood, psychiatric hospitalization became a recurring part of my life.

Overstimulation.

Emotional dysregulation.

Self-harm.

Suicidality.

Hospitalization.

Repeat.

For years that was my reality.

At twenty-one years old, I was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Later that diagnosis was changed to schizoaffective disorder.

At twenty-eight years old, I experienced a severe suicide attempt that resulted in significant damage to my airway.

I underwent emergency surgery and was left with a tracheostomy tube.

For seven months I was unable to speak.

For seven months I breathed through a tube in my neck.

For seven months I underwent surgery after surgery while trying to survive physically and emotionally.

It was one of the most difficult periods of my life.

Even then, I was still struggling deeply.

I was still ending up on psychiatric holds.

The only difference was that because of my medical condition, I often ended up on medical units rather than psychiatric units.

By the end of 2020, I was exhausted.

I had spent years cycling through hospitals, diagnoses, crises, and systems that often left me feeling more disconnected from myself than before.

I had lost so much time.

So much energy.

So much hope.

One doctor told me that my insurance records showed more than seventy psychiatric hospitalizations.

I remember hearing that number and feeling something shift inside me.

For the first time, I stopped seeing hospitalization as something that was helping me.

I started asking myself different questions.

I started wondering what healing could look like.

I started wondering who I might be outside of hospitals.

I started wondering whether there was another way forward.

On December 30, 2020, I found an online peer support meeting.

I had no idea that one decision would change my life.

The meeting was an All Recovery Meeting facilitated by Certified Peer Support Specialists.

What I found there was unlike anything I had experienced before.

Nobody was trying to fix me.

Nobody was trying to diagnose me.

Nobody was telling me who I was.

People were simply showing up as human beings and supporting one another.

They were sharing honestly.

They were reflecting on their lives.

They were talking about growth, values, fears, relationships, strengths, and challenges.

They were vulnerable.

They were compassionate.

They were real.

And for the first time in a very long time, I felt at home.

I started attending those meetings every day.

Sometimes multiple times a day.

I listened.

I learned.

I shared.

I grew.

I discovered that healing could happen through connection.

I discovered that healing could happen in community.

I discovered that there were people who genuinely cared about one another without needing authority over one another.

Peer support changed my life.

It helped me build self-awareness.

It helped me understand myself.

It helped me reconnect with parts of myself that I thought were gone forever.

It brought incredible people into my life who became my chosen family.

People who showed me kindness, honesty, support, and acceptance in ways I had never experienced before.

Peer support gave me something that years of hospitalization never could.

It gave me belonging.

It gave me connection.

It gave me hope.

And ultimately, it inspired me to create Unlock Psych.

Everything you see here exists because of that journey.

It exists because I know what it feels like to be trapped in systems that leave you feeling powerless.

It exists because I know what it feels like to search for people who understand.

And it exists because I believe every person deserves spaces where they can be heard, respected, supported, and treated with dignity.

My story is still being written.

I’m still learning.

I’m still growing.

I’m still healing.

But today, instead of spending my energy trying to survive alone, I spend my time building community, supporting others, and creating the kind of spaces I once desperately needed myself.

If you’ve found your way here because you’re carrying your own story, I want you to know something that peer support taught me:

You do not have to carry it alone.