I lay there yelling into the void of my room. Constrained and not able to move my arms or legs. I was restrained and bound to my bed for attempting to assault the staff of Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, CT. I was 17 years old and I was diagnosed with Bipolar Type 1. No medicine could stop the anger and rage that I felt.
The rage wasn’t just about the hospital. It was older, deeper — terror wrapped in fire, years of silent humiliation pressed down until it exploded.
I didn’t have the language to name it at the time. All I knew was that my mind was a cage, and my body had become its prisoner.
Bound to the bed, I wasn’t thinking about my future or my diagnosis. I wasn’t trying to hurt the staff. I was trying to claw my way out of a life I hadn’t chosen — fighting invisible forces no one else could see.
Every restraint on my arms and legs only made the wildfire inside me burn hotter. I screamed because I didn’t know what else to do. I fought because it felt like the only way to survive.
A few months earlier, I went on a mission trip to Haiti, which changed my life forever. I lived and experienced the life of a Haitian. I felt their pain and their sorrow. I witnessed the devastation that plagued the island. People begging for food, people having nowhere to go, no shelter, and no hope. Corruption permeated the capital and the cities. The water was toxic, and food was scarce. It was like a horror film where the streets were filled with decaying corpses, zombies. I took it all in at the age of 17. How could you not walk away changed, and your soul aching?
I didn’t realize it at the time, but Haiti had cracked something open inside me. All the sorrow I witnessed, all the helplessness I couldn’t fix, had settled into my bones like a slow, invisible poison. I carried their grief back home, but I had nowhere to put it. There was no roadmap for how a seventeen-year-old was supposed to process a nation’s suffering. So I buried it. I stuffed it down next to the shame, the fear, the rage I was already carrying — until there was no more room left. When I exploded at Silver Hill, it wasn’t just because of the hospital walls or the diagnosis — it was because my soul had been packed tight with too much sorrow for too long, and it finally tore itself open.
In the days that followed, the restraints came off, but the battle within me raged on. The medication began its slow work, dulling the sharp edges of my emotions, but it couldn't touch the memories. The faces of those I'd met in Haiti haunted my sleep, their hollow eyes mirroring the emptiness I felt inside. The doctors spoke of chemical imbalances and therapy, offering words like "diagnosis" and "treatment plan," but none of it felt like it touched the heart of what was breaking me. It wasn't just a disorder they were treating; it was a soul in crisis, a young man caught between the weight of the world's suffering and the fragile, fractured pieces of his own. I began to see the hospital, not as a prison, but as a strange, liminal space—a waiting room between who I had been and who I might become.
It took years to accept my diagnosis fully, and could you blame me? At 17, I lost my parents to divorce, I lost my house to foreclosure, and I had the weight of Haiti in my heart. I studied Bipolar a year before in Advanced Placement Psychology, and there was no way I thought I was Bipolar. Yet, as time proved, I did exhibit the spell of this diagnosis when I didn’t take the medication properly. I wanted to run away from it all. My family, my hometown, and my life. I was accepted to Liberty University in Virginia in 2009, and I swore to myself that I would open up to anybody about the tragedy that happened in 2008. I was a new man, without medication, and free as a bird with my mother’s blessing not to seek treatment. That decision had devastating consequences.
It was at Liberty University where the pendulum of my mental health swung violently. Without the stabilizing force of medication, my moods became erratic, unpredictable. The highs were dizzying, fueled by a restless energy and a false sense of invincibility. I took on too much, slept too little, and talked incessantly, convinced I was on the verge of some great revelation. But the lows followed with crushing speed, dragging me into abysses of despair where the weight of everything I’d carried from Haiti, and the weight of my recent losses, felt insurmountable. I isolated myself in my dorm room, unable to face the world, lost in the echo chamber of my own racing thoughts. The vibrant campus life faded into the background, replaced by a relentless internal battle. It was a cruel irony—I had come to Liberty to escape the shadows of my past, only to find them amplified in the silence of my own unchecked mind.
It wasn’t long before the cracks in my façade began to show.
Professors noticed my erratic behavior — the restless energy during lectures, the grandiose tangents I would spiral into during discussions.
My friends grew distant, confused by the rapid shifts in my moods — one day electric and charismatic, the next withdrawn and unreachable.
Rumors started to circulate. Whispers filled the halls of my dormitory. I was no longer the clean slate I had hoped to become at Liberty.
Instead, I was unraveling in plain sight, the shadows I had tried so desperately to outrun now bleeding into every corner of my new life.
Looking back, it’s clear: I wasn’t escaping anything. I was carrying my silent chambers of despair wherever I went — hidden, but never truly gone.
My behavior spiraled further into chaos. One night, fueled by manic energy and a delusion of grandeur, I stripped down to my boxers in the dormitory hallway, proclaiming myself a visionary destined for fame and fortune. I broke curfew repeatedly, driven by an insatiable need to move, to create, to express the torrent of thoughts racing through my mind. An irresistible impulse led me to the university pool late one evening, where I attempted to swim in my boxers, convinced I was partaking in a sacred ritual. The line between reality and fantasy blurred completely. I experienced periods of psychosis where I believed I possessed divine knowledge and supernatural powers, convinced I was a modern-day messiah. I lost touch with the world around me, retreating into a world of my own making, where my thoughts and delusions reigned supreme. It became increasingly clear to everyone around me that I was not just struggling; I was unraveling, consumed by a mania that detached me entirely from reality.
Eventually, the illusion shattered. The university could no longer ignore my behavior. Resident assistants filed reports. Professors grew concerned. Friends grew distant.
I wasn’t given a choice. The Dean of Students ordered me to be hospitalized for evaluation — a few weeks locked away, drugged into compliance, given false assurances that my diagnosis meant I could return. But when I came back to campus, still groggy, still fragile, the truth hit me like a second blow. In a closed-door meeting, the Dean told me I was unfit for campus life. I was banned and expelled — not because I hadn’t tried, but because I was a risk they weren’t willing to carry. I had only a few hours to pack my life into bags and leave, warned that if I stayed any longer, I would be arrested for trespassing.
I crashed at a friend’s house that night, dazed, broken, trying to comprehend how quickly it had all collapsed. My sister, passing through Virginia by sheer providence, picked me up days later. I left Liberty University not in triumph, but in tatters — carrying only a suitcase, a shattered mind, and a silence so deep it ached in my bones.
Returning home was not the homecoming I had envisioned. Instead of a new beginning, it felt like a retreat into a familiar darkness. The house, once a symbol of stability, now echoed with the ghosts of what had been lost—my parents' marriage, our financial security, and now, my own shattered dreams. Every room held a memory of who I used to be, a reminder of the life I thought I was building. I moved through the days in a fog, numb to everything but the incessant churn of my thoughts. The silence of my hometown, once comforting, now amplified the chaos in my mind. I was a stranger in a place I knew intimately, disconnected from the world and from myself. The future, once a horizon filled with possibilities, had narrowed to a single, inescapable point: the reality of my diagnosis, and the crushing weight of what I had lost.
The weeks that followed blurred into a haze of half-memories and broken days. I know I was hospitalized again that year — maybe more than once — though the timeline feels slippery now, like trying to grasp mist.
What I remember clearly is the sense of inevitability. The same detached faces of hospital staff. The same sterile halls. The same endless forms asking the same endless questions. Each admission felt like another nail hammered into the coffin of the future I had once dreamed for myself. It didn’t feel like healing. It felt like surrender — not to wellness, but to the reality that whatever normal life was supposed to be, it was slipping further out of reach. I wasn’t fighting anymore. I was drifting, drugged and disoriented, clinging to whatever scraps of self I had left.
There are moments in life when survival feels less like a victory and more like a sentence. I didn’t walk out of those hospitals with a triumphant story to tell. I stumbled out — bruised, medicated, and half-convinced that the best parts of me had been lost forever. Hope wasn’t some blazing light waiting for me. It was a faint ember buried beneath ash, so small I barely believed it still existed. At seventeen, I had seen too much, lost too much, broken too much to believe in easy answers. But somehow, even in the silent chambers of despair, something fragile and stubborn inside me refused to die. And though I didn’t know it yet, that stubborn ember would be enough — enough to carry me through the darkness ahead, one brutal step at a time.