At 17, I was put on psychiatric medication. At 18, I was told I had bipolar disorder and would need medication for the rest of my life. Nobody asked about trauma. Nobody asked what was underneath. They just handed me a diagnosis and a prescription and sent me on my way.
By 22, I was a zombie. Overmedicated, undertreated, and slowly disappearing into something I didn't recognize as myself. One of the antipsychotics I was put on gave me tardive dyskinesia — a condition that causes involuntary movements and can be permanent. I was in my early twenties. I got a lifelong side effect from a medication I was given for a condition I didn't actually have.
Add to that: fibromyalgia, hEDS, POTS, a severe B12 deficiency, and a body that started falling apart faster than I could keep up with. At 25. All while the medical system kept handing me new labels and new prescriptions — the best doctors, the top specialists, the most revered names — and not one of them could give me real answers. Some of them were the ones doing the misdiagnosing. Some of them gaslit me to my face.
Now at 25, repressed memories have started surfacing. Years of trauma I hadn't consciously accessed are coming back. And with them came a clarity I didn't expect — the realization that what I had been living with, what had been driving everything, was almost certainly CPTSD. Complex trauma. Not bipolar disorder. Not what they said.
The diagnosis was wrong. It had probably always been wrong. And the treatment for the wrong diagnosis left permanent marks on my body.
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Here's the part that took me longest to say out loud: while all of this was happening, I was largely alone.
I grew up in a Pakistani Muslim household. My parents are not bad people — but they are people who do not have the language or the willingness to acknowledge certain things. Mental illness. Trauma. A daughter who was falling apart in ways that didn't fit neatly into what our culture makes room for.
I remember being in the ER, passed out, a blood clot — my body in genuine crisis. My parents didn't believe it was serious. They flew to Florida for Christmas without me. I was alone in that hospital. That is a sentence I still have to sit with sometimes: I was alone in that hospital.
Friends came and went. Relationships frayed under the weight of chronic illness and the particular exhaustion of being someone who needs more than the average person and has learned to ask for less. The people I thought would show up often didn't. The isolation wasn't dramatic — it was quiet, and slow, and it accumulated.
So there I was: failed by doctors, unseen by family, quietly losing friends, and running out of places to put my pain.
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I grew up Muslim. Islam was the container I was given for everything — grief, meaning, suffering, hope. Sincerely, for a long time, it held me; however, at some point, somewhere in the middle of all of this, it stopped resonating in the way it once had. Not because I stopped believing in something… because the something I believed in had grown larger than any single tradition could hold.
What happened next is hard to fully put into words, and I'm still making sense of it. I believe I had a spiritual awakening — an irreversible eye-opening experience , the kind that rearranges you at your core. The kind where you start seeing things you can't unsee and knowing things you can never unknow. I became deeply attuned to energy, to intuition, without even realizing it, I was enlightening myself to the parts of human experience that medicine ignores and religion sometimes flattens.
That awakening became its own kind of medicine. Not a replacement for treatment — but a way of hearing myself again after years of being told I couldn't trust what I heard. My intuition, it turned out, had been right all along. About my body. About my diagnoses. About the people around me. About what I needed. In the solitude of isolation, a newfound appreciation for meditation, I somehow began to improve my own mental + physical health; I finally feel done grieving the life I thought I had lost and even excited with my deeper clarity to lead a purpose-filled life
Nobody handed me that. I found it in the dark, mostly by myself, mostly out of necessity.
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I'm not sharing all of this for sympathy nor do I want pity. I'm sharing this all because I know I am not the only one who has lived some version of this story — failed by medicine, unseen by family, spiritually unmoored, trying to heal with no map and no support system.
There are so many of us. Especially women. Especially women of color. Especially those of us raised in cultures where suffering is supposed to be quiet, faith is supposed to be simple, and the body's signals are supposed to be overridden by authority.
Your intuition about your own body and mind is data. It counts. You are allowed to question a diagnosis. You are allowed to say this doesn't fit. You are allowed to trust yourself even when every institution in your life is telling you not to.
Nobody told me that. I'm telling you now.
This newsletter is where I share what I've learned — through chronic illness, through trauma, through a spiritual path I had to find outside the lines, through being failed by every system that was supposed to help me and having to build something new from what was left.
Some of it will be uncomfortable. Some of it will be taboo. All of it will be honest.
If anyone is truly struggling with their health, psychosis-adjacent issues, or suicidal ideation, please consult a trusted professional, not just any online publication, including this one.
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