Untitled by Christelle Potgieter

Christelle Potgieter

Christelle is a Namibia-based writer currently working on a memoir about trauma, addiction, and recovery titled, Fear. Her writing explores mental health, resilience, and the strength women find in reclaiming their lives after hardship.

People often ask when my mental illness started. I never know how to answer that question.

Did it begin when I was a child living in a home where safety did not exist? When I learned too early that the people meant to protect you can also hurt you? Or did it begin later, when the panic attacks started and nobody asked what had happened to me—only what was wrong with me?

Somewhere along the way, the word trauma disappeared and the word disorder took its place.

I did not enter the mental health system because I wanted to. I entered it because I was trying to survive.

When fear lives inside your body long enough, it starts to look like madness from the outside. Panic attacks look like instability. Dissociation looks like confusion. Despair looks like pathology.

But inside, it simply feels like terror.

I remember sitting in psychiatric waiting rooms that smelled like disinfectant and quiet resignation. I remember answering questionnaires about my mood, my sleep, my appetite. I remember trying to explain something much bigger than a checklist.

What I wanted to say was: I am not broken. I am overwhelmed.

But that language rarely exists inside clinical conversations.

Instead, there are diagnoses.

And prescriptions.

Medication entered my life slowly at first, then all at once. Pills that promised stability. Pills that promised relief. Pills that promised to quiet the storms inside my mind.

At one point I was prescribed medication that changed my body in ways I was not prepared for. Over time I gained twenty-five kilograms. My reflection became unfamiliar to me. My body felt heavy, slow, almost disconnected from the person I believed myself to be.

No one had prepared me for how much that would affect my sense of self.

Doctors often talk about side effects in clinical terms. Weight gain. Fatigue. Emotional blunting. But living inside those side effects is different. It is waking up one day and realizing your body feels like someone else’s.

It is watching your confidence disappear slowly.

It is feeling like a stranger inside your own skin.

At the same time, my life outside the psychiatric office was chaotic and unstable. Trauma does not stay politely in the past. It bleeds into relationships, work, and self-perception.

I struggled with depression that sometimes felt like falling into a hole with no bottom. I struggled with panic attacks that came without warning. And eventually, I struggled with alcohol.

Alcohol became a kind of medicine of its own.

It quieted the fear for a few hours. It softened the constant tension in my chest. It made the world feel less sharp and threatening.

Of course, it also created new problems.

Addiction has a way of convincing you that it is helping you survive while slowly dismantling your life. At the time, though, it felt like the only thing that worked.

When people judge addiction from the outside, they often see recklessness or weakness. What they do not see is the desperate search for relief.

They do not see the nights when your mind refuses to rest. They do not see the memories that replay themselves when the room is quiet. They do not see how badly a person can want peace.

Looking back now, I realize that many of the choices I made were not about destruction. They were about survival.

Even becoming an exotic dancer at one point in my life came from that same survival instinct. When you feel unsupported, financially unstable, and emotionally alone, you start making decisions based on what will keep you afloat in the moment.

From the outside, those decisions can look chaotic or irresponsible.

From the inside, they can feel logical.

The problem with the way society talks about mental illness is that it often removes context. Behaviors are separated from the stories that created them.

Trauma becomes invisible.

Poverty becomes invisible.

Loneliness becomes invisible.

And what remains is a person labeled “mentally ill.”

I spent years believing something was fundamentally wrong with me. That my emotions were too intense. That my reactions were too extreme. That I was somehow defective.

But healing slowly introduced me to a different possibility.

What if my mind was responding exactly the way a human mind responds to prolonged fear?

What if panic attacks were not signs of weakness but signals from a nervous system that had been pushed too far?

What if depression was not simply a chemical imbalance but also grief that had never been acknowledged?

These questions changed the way I see myself.

They did not erase the struggles. Recovery is not a straight line, and I still have difficult days. But understanding the role trauma played in my life allowed me to replace shame with compassion.

It allowed me to begin rebuilding a relationship with myself.

One of the most powerful tools in that process has been writing. Writing gave me a language for experiences that once felt impossible to describe. It allowed me to transform chaos into narrative, pain into meaning.

I began writing my story not because I believed it was extraordinary, but because I suspected it was common.

There are many women who carry histories like mine. Women who were hurt early in life. Women who were later diagnosed, medicated, and misunderstood. Women who learned to numb themselves with substances or risky choices because no one taught them healthier ways to cope.

Their stories often remain invisible.

We live in a world that prefers simple explanations. Labels are simple. Diagnoses are simple. But human lives are rarely simple.

My life has included trauma, psychiatric treatment, addiction, survival work, and eventually recovery. It has also included growth, resilience, and a slow rediscovery of my own voice.

That voice was quiet for a long time.

Fear has a way of silencing people. Shame does too.

But telling the truth about our lives can be a form of resistance. It challenges the idea that people struggling with mental health issues are merely symptoms or diagnoses.

We are not case studies.

We are stories.

And sometimes the most important part of those stories is the context that was missing from the beginning.

When I look back now, I no longer see a “crazy” person stumbling through life making irrational choices.

I see a young woman trying desperately to survive circumstances she was never prepared for.

Survival does not always look graceful.

Sometimes it looks messy.

Sometimes it looks like addiction.

Sometimes it looks like breakdowns, hospital visits, or decisions that outsiders struggle to understand.

Sometimes survival looks like madness.

But surviving long enough to eventually tell the story—that is its own kind of strength.