Anxiety, Depression, and the Roots of the Glitch
A Note Before You Read
Content Warning: The following text discusses experiences with depression, past suicide attempts, and domestic violence. Please prioritize your emotional safety and read only if you feel grounded enough to do so.
After my last post reviewing After.Life (2009) and my reflection on depression and my second suicide attempt seven years ago, I want to offer more context to my experience.
For years, I fought with myself; not to find a purpose, but to survive. To survive myself. To survive the same numbness that consumes enormous resources. I don’t just mean energy; I mean the resources of the mind: the way I thought, analysed, structured, and processed daily information.
For me, depression didn’t just appear at 19 or seven years ago; it was the result of anxiety. As I have learned in recent years, anxiety and depression are twin sisters, bound strongly to one another. They cannot live without each other. They are like a nut: on one side is anxiety, and on the other is depression. I ate the anxiety first, and then I reached the depression.
Everything started in my childhood. Even though I don’t remember much of that early part, my mother’s stories and memories explain what happened. I will begin at the beginning.
The Fragmented Start
My mother always told me I was a wanted child, born out of love. However, circumstances forced my parents to send me to my paternal grandparents so they could return to work.
A few months after my birth (I don’t know exactly how many) I was sent away and cared for by my father’s sister. After a while, I fell ill. My mother always mentioned it was pneumonia and blamed their negligence for me ending up in the hospital. Later, I was sent to my maternal grandparents, where I had a peaceful period. I have photos to prove it: playing in the snow or sitting next to my grandmother while we played together.
The School of Fear
When it was time for kindergarten, I was brought back home. According to my mother, it was a difficult time. In that era, children in the school system were punished physically. After seeing that nothing was being done about the violence in the kindergarten, my mother withdrew me before I started primary school.
This method of punishment wasn’t unique to kindergarten; it was a common practice in the entire system, even in schools. I faced this later myself. If I ask anyone my age, they will tell me the same story: until the 8th grade, we were all pulled by our hair (the sideburns), hit with wooden rulers over our fingers, pulled by our ears, and had chalk thrown at us.
My generation lived in fear from a very young age. If a teacher complained to our parents, we weren’t afraid of the teacher, we were afraid of our parents. The beating we would get at home made us extremely careful about what we said or did.
Because of this, we were like animals in a jungle. The strongest was the most resilient and the one who studied best. Often, the top students were the meanest because they had the protection of the teachers (who would say they were “too good” to do anything bad).
Parents were put in a difficult position: “Either you keep your child in check, or we, the education system, will.” My mother told my father that from the 5th grade, I had poor results in my native language grammar and mathematics. I had huge problems, especially in the 5th grade, where I was close to failing. But before my mother could intervene, I solved it myself. I discovered that if I answered orally during class and went to the blackboard to solve exercises, I could fix my grades, because written tests disadvantaged me.
The Stigma and the Shield
Regarding my family situation, my father hit my mother immediately after I was born, which is why I was sent to my grandparents. My mother was dragged into a scandal that followed her for a long time. After my birth, her older sister’s husband tried to convince her to have a sexual relationship with him, arguing that since she was married now, whatever happened didn’t matter. (To be clear, this uncle is the only one in my entire extended family who went to prison, and at that time, he had just been released).
My mother told her sister and my father, but no one believed her, even though she refused him and nothing happened. She carried that stigma for life. I only found out this story a few years ago when I confronted her about why she never left my father. These two factors, the school system and what happened to her, made her hide nothing from my father, out of fear that it would always be turned against her.
Yes, I was beaten from the 5th to the 8th grade because of my grades. I know it is wrong, but I do not accuse them, nor do I excuse them. I am only offering an explanation for context, but as a psychologist and as the child I once was, I now acknowledge that no amount of cultural context justifies the pain of those years. Understanding why it happened doesn’t take away the fact that it shouldn’t have happened.
The Turning Point at 14
After an event when I was 14, in the 8th grade, everything changed. (I am not writing about it yet because I cannot; I don’t know when I will be ready. I am honouring that part of my journey by keeping its silence until it feels ready to be shared).
My father told me about his own childhood. Among his siblings (he has a twin brother and two other younger twin siblings, a girl and a boy, none of whom are identical twins), he was always the one sent to do everything in the household. Although he was the most fragile at birth (confirmed by my grandmother, who is still upset when talking about how she had to stay in the hospital with him for two months), he grew up to be the tallest and physically strongest.
Because of this, he became what we call in my country a “workhorse.” He still is; nothing has changed. He always helps his parents and siblings. He never knew how to stop working, and I don’t think he ever will. He told me how, when he worked at a glass factory, he hand-made two ornaments for his mother. She told him that others brought her honour, fame, and money, while he only brought her “decorations.” Those two glass decorations sat on my grandparents’ TV until I was 20, when I consciously smashed them and claimed it was an accident.
My father was never appreciated by his family, and he still isn’t. He is a man who has worked and will work until he dies because he knows nothing else, and he is good at what he is doing; he is a mechanical engineer(he can fix an entire assembly line in a factory or demolish an entire building, by himself). He is a fixer, and I admire his skill, but I have also learned that not everything can be fixed with manual labour; some things, like the wounds of the mind, require the courage to stop working and start feeling. This does not excuse his violence toward my mother for all those years. However, after that event when I was 14, things changed. During his moments of rage, I became my mother’s shield. I would ask him to hit me instead; I would scream at him that if he wanted to hit someone, he had a target right here.
The violence stopped, but I knew there was a war inside him. My father has green-blue eyes. When he is calm, they are a pleasant green, like a forest meeting the sky. But when he is angry, his eyes turn a white-blue, as if you are looking at two frozen droplets.
Numbness and Survival
I tell these stories because they link back to what I said about anxiety and depression. I always lived in fear, and so, at some point, I went numb. I felt nothing. Even if I hit myself, I didn’t feel it. If someone insulted me, I would say: “Is that all you’ve got? Surely you have more to say. Don’t stop, I’m actually enjoying this.” I know these lines because I used them my whole life.
Fear drove me. And because of that fear I started to gather knowledge like the air I breathe. From the 9th grade, I began reading Freud and The Art of War. I read everything I could get my hands on alongside the economics books for high school. My parents sent me to a private economic high school, even though they had no money, because they wanted to ensure my future so I wouldn’t go through what they did. That is why I always look for knowledge as if my life depends on it.
I never stopped loving my parents. I always wanted them to find a way to understand each other. For years they lived together but separate: separate rooms, separate lives, separate expenses. I wanted them to find peace. I never stopped visiting them. For years it was once a month; in recent years, it has been once a week.
The Golden Eyes of Fear: A Confrontation at the Sea
The road to the peace we have now wasn’t linear. It required a brutal, honest confrontation that happened in 2020, during a family vacation at the seaside. Because both my mother and I are allergic to the sun, we stayed in the hotel room while my father, my partner, and my children were at the beach.
By then, I had been in therapy for two years. I had reached a point where I finally felt strong enough to demand explanations for how I was treated as a child.
This was a massive shift; when I started therapy in 2018, I didn’t speak to my parents or my sister for six months. Even after that, I only called them once a month for the next six months. The silence was my only shield.
As I sat across from her on the sofa, I began to ask the questions I had carried for decades. As I spoke, I watched her body language shift, but mostly, I watched her eyes. My mother has brown eyes with a golden tint in the center. I noticed that as her fear grew, the brown receded and the gold expanded; a bright, fiery amber, as if her eyes were turning to liquid gold. Her pupils became tiny pinpricks of light.
She was terrified that I was about to disappear again.
When I finished, she sat in silence for several long minutes, blinking rapidly as her pupils finally dilated to their maximum. She admitted that the year of distance had hurt her more than she wanted to acknowledge. She told me she had spent those two years walking on eggshells, terrified of saying the wrong thing and losing me forever. My father had blamed her for my silence, accusing her of being the reason I walked away.
But even in that moment of vulnerability, the old patterns remained. She admitted she had never supported my choice to become a nurse. She had always wanted me to be an accountant, her own unfulfilled dream. She believed that “counting money” was the only way to ensure I’d have the resources to eventually study what I wanted. Even my father, couldn’t understand why I was still in school, constantly asking how much longer I intended to keep learning.
I had to set a final, hard boundary. I walked into the bathroom to breathe, to find my center, and when I came out, I told her:
“If you want to see us, you must stop criticizing my path. I am not living your dream of being an accountant. I am living mine.”
That day, I stopped being the child seeking permission and became the adult claiming her own life. It was the first time she truly saw me, not as an extension of her or a vessel for her regrets, but as a person who had survived and evolved.
The Path to Peace
Last week, they signed the papers for a house and a piece of land in the countryside. They plan to renovate it for us; me, my sister, and our children. So we have a place to go near the forest.
I want to be clear that this transformation didn’t happen by a miracle; it was a deliberate process. I have put a lot of work into our relationship in recent years. I finished my Psychology degree in 2023, and since then, I have consistently applied what I’ve learned to our dynamics. That is why I visit every Sunday. I chose to break the cycle. It wasn’t about fixing them; it was about making them talk to each other, it was about facilitating communication, so I can visit and not feel like I am in a war zone. Since it is their responsibility to take the next step alongside us, it was about healing the way I relate to them and establishing boundaries that were never there.
They don’t fully know what I did for them. But my mother finally realized it and told me this past Christmas: “Don’t think I don’t know what you’ve been doing for a while now.” She thanked me, saying a parent’s duty is to prepare the child for life, not to always stand beside them. She said she was sorry I had a hard childhood, but she did what she could with what she had.
To end on a happy note: when they told me in January that they were buying a house near my mother parent’s house(where my mother’s brother live, her childhood house) and land, I felt a moment of rest. On 29.03.2026 they showed me papers of the house and their both names are on the deed of the house.
I cried so much that my mother begged me over the phone to stop, saying everything would be fine and that our kids would have a place for their summer vacation. Through her own tears, she told me her plans. I cried not because the house fixes the past, but because it felt like the weight of my parents’ lifelong war was finally being put down. It was a release of a burden that wasn’t mine to carry, but which I felt every day of my childhood.
I don’t write this to excuse my parents’ behavior or to say hitting a child is normal. Far from it. I have never raised my hand against anyone in my life; in fact, I always turned the other cheek and dared them to hit me again.
But they taught me:
- Life is unfair, and I do what I can with what is put in my path.
- Work is the most important thing; as long as I have hands and feet and I am healthy, I can work, but I’ve also learned to rest, to take frequent vacations when I need a reset, and to find passions that truly fuel me.
- Family is a complex system where everyone fights their own battle; we can offer support, but solidarity must never come at the cost of my own psychological integrity or the blurring of my individual boundaries.
- Whatever I do, there is no “I can’t,” only “I won’t.”
- If not me, then who?
- Get up from the ground even if I can’t. As long as I breathe, it means I still can. Every day is a new battle, but also a new adventure where I discover who I am and where I want to go.
- Life is a lady of easy virtue who sells you happiness by the gram, so don’t go looking for it. Happiness doesn’t exist; I create it in small and simple moments that allow me to see myself as a whole. I am no longer a collection of broken pieces that I must glue back together at the end of the day just to earn a reward. Instead, I live my life one day at a time, as a new adventure that offers me small joys.
- I learned that ‘I can’t’ is sometimes a necessary boundary, not a failure.
- I learned that while my parents did their best with what they had, I am allowed to want, and create, something better and gentler for myself.
I have seen their mistakes, I see their efforts, and I accept them as they are. But I no longer carry their burden.
While I share my story to offer perspective, please remember that every healing path is individual. If you find yourself in a similar situation, I strongly encourage you to reach out for professional support.
Global Resources for Support and Healing
If you or someone you know is struggling with abuse or mental health challenges, please reach out to these free, confidential, and professional services:
The National Domestic Violence Hotline (Global Access) While based in the US, their website offers extensive safety planning tools, educational articles, and a 24/7 chat service that can guide survivors globally on how to stay safe.
Chayn An award-winning global platform that provides multilingual resources, guides, and online courses for survivors of abuse. Their Global Directory helps you find local support services in almost any country.
7 Cups A mental health ecosystem providing 24/7 free emotional support. You can chat anonymously with trained “listeners” or join support groups for trauma, anxiety, and depression.
Find A Helpline A comprehensive global tool that connects you to over 1,600 free and confidential helplines worldwide. You can filter by country and the specific issue you are facing (abuse, suicide prevention, etc.).
Bright Sky App A free mobile app (available in many countries, including Romania) that provides information on domestic abuse and a secure directory of specialist support services. It includes a “Journal” feature to safely record incidents of abuse.
Befrienders Worldwide A global network of centers providing confidential emotional support to people in crisis or experiencing suicidal thoughts. They offer a safe space to be heard without judgment.
Blue Knot Foundation A leading organization specialized in Complex Trauma (CPTSD). They provide extensive educational resources and support specifically for adult survivors of childhood trauma.
