The Dark Night of My Soul: What I Know One Year Later
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A year ago today, I voluntarily walked through the heavy metal door of a private psychiatric hospital in San Antonio, Texas. The door clanged shut behind me, and I immediately regretted my decision. I had crossed a threshold. It was terrifying to admit I needed that level of help, but it was also, in its own way, an act of survival.
Today, I am in a totally different place, physically, mentally, emotionally, and geographically. Gratefully.
This is the story I couldn’t tell then. The story of what actually led me there.
A few weeks ago, I was sitting in my home overlooking Lake Atitlán in Guatemala, when bombas started going off down the road. Loud fireworks without the lights, the kind that sound like cannon blasts. I overheard someone down on the road say that it had been a year since the murder of a man had occurred just a three-minute walk from my door. Evidently his loved ones were commemorating the one-year anniversary of his death.
I remembered that day vividly. I had been alone in the house when it happened. I didn’t hear the murder itself, only its aftermath: the moans and wails of the women who loved him, which went on for hours. He had been hacked to death with a machete in broad daylight, attacked by an enemy on his walk to work.
The bombas brought back the trauma that I went through last summer. I felt tears near the surface. Shakiness. The old familiar fear: what if it happens to me again? Not the violence, but the darkness that followed.
After the murder, I went downhill fast. There was a period during the height of my anxiety when I could not stop obsessively visualizing the grisly scene down the road. It fueled my depression even though I didn’t know the victim. It was one of many seemingly minor triggers that accumulated into something much larger.
Here is what I can see now, with the gift of retrospect.
Last spring, I was carrying more burdens than I realized. Accusations of cultural appropriation arrived in my Instagram comments from a stranger, targeting my offering of online Mayan calendar readings. In my already weakened state, it hit harder than it should have. I have the blessing of the Mayan elders and teachers I’ve learned from for years to share their wisdom and serve as a bridge between their profound indigenous cosmology and the Western mind. I know this. But knowing something and feeling it don’t always go hand-in-hand when your nervous system is frayed.
I’d been planning to co-lead a New Year’s yoga retreat and hadn’t yet been able to generate registrations. I felt guilt I couldn’t shake. Without consulting my husband and daughter, I had booked a flight to England for a women’s retreat in Glastonbury, England—a trip I had romanticized as a birthday gift to myself.
I wanted to escape my life, just for a little while. Without asking permission. I longed for solitude, for time to reflect and revel.
But instead of a carefree personal retreat, I became trapped in the labyrinth of my own mind. I fell into insomnia, anxiety, and a deep dark well of depression. Confusion, chaos, and angst that took away my ability to read, see, hear, or move with my typical clarity, presence and joy. I found myself holed up in a tiny Airbnb in Notting Hill, a neighborhood I had lived in at age 19 during a semester abroad, so a place I had imagined revisiting with nostalgia and perspective.
I was paralyzed by the weight of everything I had been carrying.
I never made it to the retreat and booked a last-minute transatlantic flight to Texas, where I grew up and where my parents live, after spending just two sleepless nights in London.
I couldn’t grasp at the time why so many small triggers had led to such a major crisis. The effect felt wildly incongruent with the cause.
Only recently have I been able to see the larger pattern. I was rebelling against the oppression I felt in my roles as wife and mother, breadwinner and upstanding citizen. I dropped those masks for a while, but the guilt and shame I felt for making several rash decisions piled up and turned me against myself.
The primary factor in my breakdown, the one I couldn’t acknowledge until many months after the fact, was the state of my marriage.
Chronic tension, poor communication, accumulated resentments, a toxic cycle of me escaping into work and him accusing me of lying and cheating. My husband and I are working on it now, with more honesty and intention than we’ve ever brought to our relationship. Looking into attachment styles and love languages. Going to couples therapy. Having more conscious conversations. Practicing yoga together. Going to the Sunday morning market. Doing saunas as our date day.
It is tender, real work.
On June 2, 2025, I voluntarily checked myself into a psych ward. Two decades earlier, I had been committed to the Austin State Hospital against my will due to a manic episode. Choosing to walk through that door at 45 felt like facing my deepest fear. My mind told me I would never get better, that I would be trapped in endless depression and anxiety forever. Of course, that wasn’t the truth. Slowly, with time, patience, medication, and the love of my dad, my sister, my friend Amanda, and many other dear friends and relatives, I did improve.
It is only with the passage of time and the gift of retrospect that I see the larger pattern at play and embrace all aspects of my shadow and light. I hug my inner child at age eight, crouching on a linoleum floor during a tornado. I hug my inner teen at 14, her innocence lost. I hug my inner young adult at 24, with suicidal ideation in California. And I hug my inner self from a year ago, 45 years old, sitting in a hospital in Texas, pacing the halls, waiting for the shift that felt like it would never come.
It came. It always does, eventually.
I know I am on a lifelong path of healing and transformation that sometimes gets treacherous. The challenging times I’ve faced enable me to navigate the rocky path with grace, gratitude, and laughter.
If you are struggling, tell someone.
The telling is itself an act of courage, and courage is how we survive the dark nights of the soul. You are not alone. Your story matters. And the door, even the heavy one that clangs shut behind you, can and will open again.
