HEART OF SURVIVAL

THE HEART OF SURVIVAL PART I: DESPAIR Chapter 1: The Child Who Was Never Just a Child By Mr Black I cannot remember the exact moment childhood began to feel like something I had lost. There was no announcement, no clear warning, and no particular morning when I woke up and suddenly understood that something inside me had changed. Looking back now, I can only recognise the gradual difference between the child I was supposed to be and the person I was becoming. I was ten when depression began to settle into my world. Ten. At that age, I should have been worrying about ordinary things. I should have been laughing without needing a reason, looking forward to birthdays, making mistakes without believing they defined my entire existence, and discovering the world with the freedom that childhood is supposed to offer. Instead, I was beginning to experience feelings I did not know how to explain. I did not have the language to describe what was happening inside my mind. I could not sit down and give someone a clear account of my emotions because I did not fully understand them myself. I only knew that something felt wrong, and I had no idea how to make it right. People saw a child. Inside, I felt much older. It was a strange contradiction. My age said one thing, but my thoughts seemed to belong to someone who had already spent years trying to understand life. I found myself thinking about things I could not easily discuss, carrying feelings I could not organise, and questioning parts of my existence that I did not even know how to put into words. I was growing up physically, but something else was happening inside me. My mind was becoming a place I did not always understand, and I had no instructions for navigating it. I wish I could say that I recognised what was happening and knew how to ask for help. The truth is that a child cannot always identify their own suffering. Sometimes, they only know that they are unhappy. Sometimes, they assume that whatever they feel must be normal because they have never experienced anything different. And sometimes, they become so accustomed to carrying their feelings alone that they stop imagining what it might be like to share them. I cannot say that every adult around me knew what I was experiencing. I cannot know what they noticed or what they failed to recognise. But I know that, from my own perspective, I was struggling with things I did not know how to communicate. There is a particular loneliness in experiencing something you cannot explain. You may want someone to understand you, yet you cannot find the words that would help them see what you see. You may even become frustrated with yourself because you cannot translate your feelings into something another person can recognise. How do you ask for help when you do not know what you need help with? How do you explain sadness when you cannot identify where it begins? How do you tell someone that you are struggling when you do not have the words to describe the struggle? I did not have answers to those questions. I only knew that I was no longer experiencing childhood in the simple way I imagined other children did. As time passed, I began to understand that growing older did not automatically mean becoming emotionally stronger. A child could learn to hide their feelings without learning how to manage them. A child could become quieter without becoming more peaceful. A child could appear to be coping while carrying things they had no idea how to process. Looking back, I can see how easily a child's silence might be misunderstood. Silence can look like obedience. It can look like maturity. It can even look like independence. But silence does not always mean that everything is fine. Sometimes, a child has simply stopped knowing how to explain what is happening. I do not want to portray my younger self as someone who understood everything or had no responsibility for their actions. I was still learning. I made mistakes, reacted to situations in ways I did not always understand, and had plenty of growing to do. But I also deserved the opportunity to grow without believing that my struggles made me a bad person. There is a difference between correcting a child and making that child feel as though something is fundamentally wrong with them. There is a difference between teaching responsibility and allowing shame to become the way they understand themselves. I did not always know that difference. For a long time, I simply tried to make sense of the person I was becoming. Perhaps the hardest part was that I could not return to the version of myself who had existed before these feelings began. Even if I could not explain the change, I could sense it. Something had shifted, and I was left trying to understand a world that felt increasingly difficult to navigate. I was ten years old. I did not need to have life figured out. I did not need to understand every emotion, anticipate every consequence, or possess the wisdom of an adult. I needed room to be a child. I needed the chance to learn about myself without treating every difficult feeling as evidence that I was failing. Most importantly, I needed to understand that struggling did not make me undeserving of care. I would spend years trying to make sense of parts of myself that I could not explain at ten. I would question my behaviour, revisit memories, and wonder whether I could have become a different person if I had understood myself earlier. But the child I was could not have known everything I know now. That child was learning how to exist in a world that did not always make sense. And that is where my story begins: not with a child who had all the answers, but with one who was already searching for them. I did not know what the coming years would bring. I only knew that something inside me had changed. And I did not know how to change it back.