Trigger Warning: This story contains mentions of self-harm, mental health distress and suicide.

If your child is in crisis right now, please reach out to emergency services or a crisis line in your area first. This story is about what came after that immediate danger had passed, and it is not a substitute for urgent care.

I did not choose this work.
It chose me.

I was in the hospital.

Earlier that day, I had received every parent’s worst nightmare. A call saying my 16-year-old daughter had taken an overdose with the intent to end her life. She had been rushed to the hospital by ambulance.

I was in shock.

I felt like I had failed as a mum, as if this was all my fault.

I sat beside her through that night, and I made her a promise. I would do everything in my power to help her heal. And when I was able, I would help other families who were walking the same road.

What followed was years of searching in the dark.

The labels the professionals gave did not fit. The therapies missed the point entirely. Our world shrank as I tried to hold everything together, questioning every decision, second-guessing myself constantly, and fighting the particular exhaustion of being the only person in the room who believed something important was being missed.

Eventually, I found the word burnout. And then autistic burnout. And slowly, painstakingly, things began to make sense.

But there was no map for what came next.

No guide for the long middle of recovery. No one who understood both what my daughter needed and what I was carrying as her mother.

I was figuring it out through trial and error, often getting it wrong, always showing up anyway.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I began to understand my own story differently, too. My own neurodivergence. The patterns I had carried since childhood. The ways I had been holding everyone together for as long as I could remember.

Once I understood what she actually needed, once I let go of a one-size-fits-all approach and started building something that fit our family specifically, I saw the difference. She began to heal.

Healing was not linear for either of us. It still is not.

Now, more than five years later, she is living independently and studying at university, and I am slowly reshaping my own identity, figuring out what our new normal looks like on the other side of something that changed all of us.

The promise I made in that hospital room became this work.