I became an activist and artist because I was stripped of almost everything: health, stability, belonging, and safety. I had nothing left to lose.

I had worked so hard to do well in this toxic culture. I tried to go to college. Complex PTSD made it almost impossible to function well enough to stay in school, work, and keep housing stable at the same time. It took me four years to complete one year of courses.

So I built a life another way. I got married, raised two kids, and homeschooled them on a quarter-acre permaculture garden. Our lives were full of adventures and explorations. I gave much to my community: founded organizations, supported campaigns, rescued animals, and even changed county policy and state law.

But trauma shapes choices. I married someone I couldn’t stay married to. My teenagers began to ask, “When are we leaving?” So we left. Right before the housing bubble burst and the Great Recession began. I had a steeply underwater mortgage, no degree, 17 years out of the workforce, was over fifty, female, and living in government contractor land. All strikes against me.

I did what I always do. I worked like hell to keep things together. I taught the kids to drive, borrowed ladders to clean my gutters, and learned home repair because I couldn’t afford help. I became the general contractor for a whole-house replumb after multiple pinhole leaks in the copper pipes. I managed to land a county job with excellent benefits, but that disappeared after 2 years, when the boss gave my position to the relative of a political ally. I was unemployed for 14 months, then took the only job I could land, working for people I later learned were Greek Mafia. It was highly abusive, and my boss knew why I couldn’t leave.

When the kids were grown, and I’d submitted almost 400 job applications, I stopped pretending hard work would save me. I quit the life that was killing me and went to live the life I had dreamed of, sailing tall ships. It was almost all volunteer work, but I had a bunk, meals, the company of shipmates, and the sea. For the first time in years, I felt alive.

Then I settled in Delaware and gained mental health coverage for the first time. I thought help for recovery from lifelong Complex PTSD had finally arrived. Instead, that was the start of the worst seven years of my life, and counting.

The mental illness industry doesn’t see people. It processes them. I was treated like a number, a case file, a diagnosis. When Lexapro caused intense suicidal ideations, I was told that it couldn’t be real because it wasn’t in the textbooks. When the ideations became unbearable, I was sent to the cuckoo’s nest for an iatrogenic condition, harm caused by the system I had turned to for help. I came out in far worse condition than when I went in.

Seven months later, a surgeon performed non-consensual surgery on me, an act of deep bodily violation that still goes unpunished. Every institution I turned to for help protected him instead. The hospital, my insurance company, the licensing board, and the justice department closed ranks. My complaints to every agency went nowhere. He’s still harming vulnerable people, protected by the system that betrayed me.

And then the disease management industry blocked me from the care I needed to recover.

Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) reveals what this kind of chronic betrayal does to a person. A human nervous system can’t regulate in a culture built on domination and contempt. Safety and connection restore regulation, but the mental illness industry offers neither. It replaces relationship with protocol, curiosity with coercion, and care with control. When you’re already overloaded from trauma, this kind of systemic cruelty shatters what little stability you’ve managed to rebuild.

That’s what happened to me. The more I sought help, the deeper the betrayal cut. But there’s something the system doesn’t understand. When you’ve been kicked to the curb your whole life, you find different ways to operate. You stop begging for inclusion in a structure that’s never going to make room for you. You learn to see what’s really there.

I no longer have to protect anything that depends on my silence. I don’t have a job to lose, can’t compete for employment, do not need a professional appearance, have no dependents to support, or motivation to climb. They already took all that. What’s left is clarity.

This culture rewards compliance and calls it health. It punishes dissent and calls it disorder. But when they’ve taken everything they can take, and you’re still standing, you gain the freedom to tell the truth about what this system really is: a machine built to maintain hierarchy by breaking human beings. When you stop trying to survive by their rules, you become dangerous.

Now I use that clarity as fuel. I’m an activist and artist exposing the systems and structures that cause nearly all human suffering. I teach people how betrayal, neglect, and hierarchy overload the nervous system, and how connection, autonomy, and real community restore it. I do this because I’ve lived what happens when the world’s “help” betrays you at every turn. I can’t change the past, but I can show others how to survive, how to reclaim life force, and how to see clearly enough to build a culture that actually supports human thriving instead of exploiting us to death.