Faye Daniels
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🖤 Life Update: A Year in the Dark
🕑 Added 2025-05-11 15:00:09 +0000 UTCTRIGGER WARNING - Talk of suicidal thoughts.
It’s hard to know where to start when the story is still being written. But I think I can begin here:
This past year nearly ended me.
In 2024, I was diagnosed with Autism, ADHD, PTSD, Depression, and Anxiety. But not before my body—and my mind—completely gave out.
Before that, I had been asking for help for years. Years.
I told my family doctor something was wrong.
That I was slipping. That things didn’t make sense anymore. That I was barely holding on. Coming back to him again and again with more symptoms, KNOWING that something was wrong.
No one listened.
Not until I lost cognitive function.
Not until I couldn’t work. Not until my nervous system shut down. Not until I was in full autistic burnout and couldn’t do the basic things people take for granted—showering, feeding myself, replying to a message, making a single decision.
That’s when someone finally looked up and said, “Maybe something’s going on here.”
December 2024: A Different Kind of Beginning
I started this healing journey in December. I’d love to say that things got better immediately. But the truth is harder than that.
There were moments—small ones—of clarity, of recognition.
But mostly? It was darkness.
I was suicidal. Not just in the abstract sense, but in the very real, very calm way where you look around and ask yourself if it’s worth continuing. When it all feels like too much. When the mountain you have to climb just to survive one more week feels impossible—and cruel.
Because even if I reach the top—
Even if I understand myself, advocate for myself, rewire my patterns, get every possible accommodation—
The world doesn’t change.
And the world we live in was not built for someone like me.
What the World Took
Living in that world meant living in fight or flight for most of my life.
It meant joy was always just out of reach.
It meant performing normalcy at the expense of my body.
It meant surviving instead of living.
There were many times in therapy when I said, honestly:
“If I knew the next 20 years would be anything like the last 20, I wouldn’t choose to stay.”
Because I wasn’t living—I was fighting for my life in a system that never valued me to begin with.
Where I Am Now
So… have I come a long way?
I think so. But how do you measure progress when you're still exhausted?
When you’re still cycling through shutdowns, still wrestling with depression, still feeling the grip of anxiety each morning?
There’s no neat arc.
There’s no clear before and after.
Only this: I’m still here.
That’s the only goal right now.
To wake up and survive the day.
If that’s all I do—that is enough.
Some days, I can do more. I can make art, I can reflect, I can write something beautiful and honest.
Other days, I disappear. Into sleep, into silence, into the slow recalibration of a system trying to relearn what safety feels like.
If You’re Still With Me
I’m writing this not to worry you. I’m writing it because I don’t want to lie.
I don’t want to make it sound like healing is a gentle glide upward. It’s not.
Some days, I am still very much in the dark.
But there is something different now. A faint light. A small shift.
A promise I made to myself: to try. One more day. And then another.
If you’re reading this, thank you. You’re witnessing something that doesn’t usually get shown:
What it looks like to begin again without certainty.
What it looks like to want to live, but not always know how.
What it looks like to tell the truth, even when it isn’t inspiring.
Even when it just is.
I don’t have answers. I have this moment.
And I’m still here.
Comments
Faye Daniels
Ugh I'm so sorry if you've felt the same.
Faye Daniels
Most people in the medical field can fuck right off. LOL
Misteralz
...and now I'm realising why I've totally 'gotten' you for the past nearly two decades. I've gone through much of the same over the past few years.
Lolly Likes
I am sorry it has taken so much for your health to be taken seriously by the medical field! I am just glad you had the fight left in you to keep going. Every minute is a milestone and I love you 💕❤️
