Let me break the ice: I fell apart.

Gracefully? No.

If someone had told me last year that I’d end up in the acute psychiatry department, I would have laughed. One of those polite laughs you do in the office kitchen while pretending the microwave isn’t taking four hours to reheat your lasagna. Because me? I was stable. Solid. A woman whose idea of chaos was a spreadsheet with one misaligned cell.

But apparently life doesn’t care about spreadsheets.

The problems at work didn’t come as big dramatic disasters. Just… this fog. A weird, impossible communication breakdown with my manager where neither of us knew how to handle the other. We were like two people trying to build IKEA furniture with different manuals, and both manuals missing page three.

And then, like a plot twist even the most dramatic novelist would call “a bit much,” I discovered I probably had a personality disorder.

And to top it all off?

My boyfriend ran away faster than a climber hurrying outside to catch the last bit of sunshine before the rain comes back. "I want a care-free life," he said. So I guess I cared.. too much? Oh, well.

So there I was: alone, confused, and checking into a hospital department I’d never imagined stepping foot in. I half expected dramatic violin music to follow me through the automatic doors.

One thing about me? I overshare. Pathologically. Give me sixty seconds and I’ll accidentally tell you my childhood traumas, my star sign, and the bizarre dream I had involving a fluorescent goat. So naturally, I started talking to the people around me. Not because I’m brave, oh no!, but because silence and I do not get along.

What surprised me wasn’t that they talked back. It was that they were… normal?

Not "institutionalised ghosts” like in movies. Not mysterious strangers rocking in corners. Just people having a very, very shitty period of life, like I was. People who cried quietly into cheap coffee cups, or paced the hallway, or sat on those scratchy sofas waiting for a doctor who always seemed to be “just five more minutes away.”

And somehow, in that not exactly glamorous hospital wing, we became a community. We talked each other down from emotional cliffs. We sat side by side, sharing bread like war rations, keeping each other company through endless hours on the same sad sofa.

Those people, strangers turned teammates, were part of my healing. And it made me wonder…

What about the ones who don’t feel like talking? The ones who aren’t naturally chatty or who aren’t about to blurt their life story to a nurse asking, “How are you today?”

What about the people who sit alone because socializing feels like walking through a minefield? Or people on the antisocial spectrum, or too frightened or ashamed to open their hearts in a hospital department?

Don’t they deserve to know this place isn’t the monster they fear? That it’s full of humans, messy, hurting, hilarious, resilient humans?

I saw a scary number of people going in and out of those departments every day. A revolving door of struggles and stories. It turns out mental health doesn’t discriminate. Shy or chatty, guarded or oversharing, traumatized or just spectacularly unlucky.

And that's why this little corner of the internet exists. A communication point. A virtual version of that hospital sofa (but far less itchy).

A place where all of us, those who talk too much, those who talk too little, and everyone in between, can share our experiences, reduce the fear, and remind each other: You’re not alone. And none of this makes you strange. It just makes you human.