This past Sunday, more than 17 million Americans tuned in to watch Prince Harry and Meghan Markle sit down for an interview with Oprah Winfrey. In an interview that spanned two hours, they covered everything from arguments over flower girl dresses, to being hounded by the press, to pointedly racist comments within the family . Meghan also talked openly about her suicidal ideations, and the lack of help she received from the royals.

While the interview admittedly leaves a lot to be broken down, the part that I cannot stop thinking about is Meghan’s mental health, and her frank discussion of the day that they had a royal engagement to go to. She’d just opened up to Harry about her mental state, and when he told her that she didn’t have to go, she answered, “I can’t be left alone.”

I have felt that feeling.

The difference being, she had the pressure of having to put on a fancy dress, and smile, and engage, and be “on” for an entire evening all while no longer wanting to be alive.

My heart breaks for Meghan Markle.

A recent perusal of Facebook made me stumble upon a discussion by some of her detractors, people who either didn’t believe her or didn’t have any sympathy for her, one pointedly stating, ” …they narcissisticly (sic) chose to put themselves on TV complaining about problems many wish they had.”

What problems do many people wish they had? The problem of being relentlessly hounded and harassed by the British press? The problem of being made to feel unwelcome by your new extended family? The problem of a family member fretting over how dark the skin of your new baby would be? The problem of being so beaten down, so broken, so hopeless, that it feels like your only option is taking your own life?

So she has money. So she’s a member of British royalty. Her mental health doesn’t care about that. It doesn’t make her immune. If anything, the added pressure (Seriously… just think for a minute the enormous amount of pressure this poor woman was up against) makes it more likely she would have issues, not less. One look at the high rates or drug and alcohol abuse, eating disorders, mental illnesses, and suicides among the rich and famous tells us everything we need to know about the intense pressures that can come with fame and notoriety. Money is not synonymous with happiness. Celebrity is not the answer for stability.

Mental illness and suicidal ideation can strike anyone, regardless of their status. It doesn’t care how much money you have. It doesn’t care how famous you are or where you live or what you do for a living. It doesn’t care if, on the surface, you have everything you could have ever wanted in your life. IT DOESN’T CARE.

And to those who are callously saying they don’t believe her: You are part of the problem. While Meghan Markle will never hear your skepticism, your mom might, or your uncle, or your cousin, or your best friend. Someone who may one day feel the same feelings of despair and know that you’re not a safe person to come to. One of the hardest parts of being in that place is the severe feeling of isolation, the feeling that there is literally no one to turn to. No matter how many friends or family members a person may have, the loneliness, and the feeling that nobody understands, is staggering. Getting up the courage and the strength to tell someone, anyone, feels impossibly hard. And now? Now you’ve ensured that your loved one can cross you off their list of possibilities. Congratulations.

I see so many people patting themselves on the back for not caring. “I don’t care about the interview. I don’t care about the royals. I don’t care what those narcissistic blah blah blah blah.” We need to care. We need to care about everyone going through a mental health crisis. Why? Because too many people never get help. Because too many people fall through the cracks. Because too many people aren’t taken seriously. Because mental illness is an epidemic, and it’s never going to get any better if we don’t collectively care for everyone who’s affected. One in four people will deal with a mental illness in their lifetime. One in four. That means you know someone, or several someones, who are suffering right now. You can be the person that poo-poos mental health needs, who chooses to sit in ignorant privilege, or you can be the safe place to fall.

You need to care. We need to care.

At the end of the day, all we have is each other. We need to care. We need to care about our friends, our families, our neighbors. We need to care about PEOPLE. People who are afraid to ask for help, and people who are desperately begging for it.

And yes, we need to care about Meghan Markle.

I started slipping sometime in November.

Looking back, it’s always hard to pinpoint an exact moment in time, but I do know it was in November. I saw my doctor on November 7th. I’d just weaned off a medication (a medication that, in retrospect, was working very well for me) because of some side effects that were starting to interfere with my life. To her credit, she promptly said, “Okay, let’s see what we should replace it with.” And me being… well, me… full of confidence and bravado, said, “I feel good. I’d like to just try going without it and see if the mood stabilizer is enough on its own.” (Spoiler: It wasn’t.)

I had maybe a good week or two after that, and then I slowly, slowly started going off the rails. I was completely free-falling by Christmas, and had all but crashed and burned by the new year.

It’s always such a hard thing to describe to someone who’s never been there, but picture this:

You’re walking (Alone. You’re always alone) in a black forest. It’s getting blacker by the day. You’re getting consumed by the blackness. While you’re walking, you’re forced to pick up and carry everything you come across: Rocks. Sticks. Boulders. Fallen trees. You can’t put anything down. You have to keep walking as your load gets bigger and bigger. You can’t do anything else. Your entire lot in life has become carrying this crushing weight through the forest.

I walked through that forest for nearly three months. Every now and then a hand would appear through the blackness. Sometimes I’d acknowledge it. Sometimes I’d even hold it. But I never, ever let it pull me out. For reasons that are unbeknownst to me, there is comfort in the blackness. There is familiarity in the blackness. There is safety in the blackness. Leaving that forest is scary, unfamiliar, and too. damn. hard. So once again, I gave in. Gave in to the darkness. Gave in to the ever-present weight of the burden on my back.

Until I couldn’t do it anymore.

Because the thing is, that pile you carry? Eventually it gets so high and precarious and unwieldy that a simple leaf could cause the whole thing to topple, crushing you under its weight.

This time that leaf came in the form of a Facebook comment. It wasn’t even a mean comment. It was a condescending comment for sure, but it wasn’t mean. On a healthy day, it would be a minor annoyance. On that day? On January 28th? It was the last proverbial straw on the camel’s back. It was the tiny little leaf that upset the balance enough to cause everything to fall. It was the thing that caused the weight of the world to finally crush me and bring me harshly and violently and helplessly down to my knees. It was the thing that felt like it would very likely kill me.

Something inside me finally broke. My reaction to the comment was so swift and so severe that I had no control over it. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t breathe. The events that followed came from a primal, guttural place that just completely took over. First, I deactivated my blog’s Facebook page (the scene of the comment slash leaf), then I deactivated my personal page. Then Messenger. Then Instagram. Then my blog itself. The official party line is that I just “needed a break” – which, to be fair, isn’t entirely untrue – but that’s not why I did it. It was so much deeper than that. In that moment, in that frantic and desperate moment, I was trying to get rid of myself. To get away from the agony that was emanating from within me. I was trying to escape the pain, but the pain was coming from INSIDE ME, so there was nowhere I could go. Somehow scrubbing myself off the internet felt like an immediate solution.

Except it wasn’t.

My internet massacre did nothing to stop what was happening, and I am indescribably thankful that I somehow still had the presence of mind to do what I did next.

First, I called my doctor, and jumped in on a cancellation that had fortuitously just opened up for the next day. Then, I called Mike at work, and while I will never remember the exact words I said, the overall message was this: “I am not okay. COME HOME NOW.”

For the next forty minutes I sat shaking and crying on the couch, while a friend tried to keep me in this stratosphere by reminding me to breathe, and asking me what I could see and feel and touch. (My pajama pants were fuzzy, and that felt very important at the time.)

Later, once he got home, Mike would ask me if I was safe. I answered with a rather vague, “Well you’re standing right next to me. You can see I’m safe.”

But the fact is, when I called him, I felt absolutely, very much, Not. Safe. And it wasn’t even that I thought I was going to harm myself, although to be brutally honest I don’t really know what would have happened if I hadn’t made those phone calls. Still, it was something more visceral than that. It was more like the depression had given birth to a panic attack, but a panic attack unlike anything I’d ever experienced before (and I am WELL VERSED in panic attacks). I was being eaten alive from the inside out, with a fierceness and voracity so severe that I was certain I was going to die. Right there, right in the middle of my kitchen, on a random Tuesday afternoon. And I felt powerless to stop it.

I had officially reached rock bottom.

What happened over the next few days was nothing more than a blur. Everything happened under a thick, thick fog. It wasn’t painful anymore, but only because I’d completely lost any capacity to feel. Or think. Or be. I was just…. there. Except I wasn’t. I saw my doctor the day after I’d broken down, and we decided on a new medication to add to my cocktail. She made me promise I was safe, that I would call if I needed her, and made a follow-up appointment for four weeks. I then spent the next several days … waiting. In that horrible interim space of wondering if a new medication is going to eventually help me, or if it’s going to make my intestines explode, or both. I was dizzy and nauseous for three days, felt physically better by day four, and started seeing slivers of light through the clouds on day six. I felt loved and supported by the few people who knew what was going on, and my family was amazing as always.

I still have all my social media locked down, but now it’s because I want to focus on getting well without the distraction (and also because I think it’s probably healthier for me to stay away for the time being). And while I’m writing this post on February 6th, I have no idea when I’m going to push “publish.” But eventually, I will. Because eventually I’ll be me again.

As for now? Each day is getting a little bit better than the last, which is bringing a cautious optimism. The forest isn’t as thick. The load isn’t as heavy. The sky isn’t as black. I’m starting to see colors again. I’m remembering what it feels like to laugh. If I were a broken leg, I’d be out of traction, but still need to wear a cast for 6 to 8 weeks.

And so, I’ll focus on getting better, being gentle with myself, and doing my very best not to beat myself up too badly up for the fact that I should have gotten help sooner.

All while being grateful as hell for the timing of the patronizing internet stranger that set off the chain that finally stripped me raw and forced me to address the bleeding.