How Working at Haymount Changed My Perspective on Life

For most of my life I carried a kind of weight that I didn’t really talk about. I struggled with depression from a young age and a lot of it came from my family life. I felt rejected early on by my biological father and that stuck with me more than I understood at the time. Growing up, I heard more things that made me feel unwanted than I did things that made me feel loved. My mom told me she hated me and that she wished I wasn’t born, and it wasn’t a one-time thing. It was consistent. There were not many moments where I was hugged or told I was loved, and over time that absence shaped how I saw myself just as much as the things that were said to me. My stepdad was kind in his own way, but he had his own biological children and naturally they came first, which left me feeling like I was always just slightly outside of where I was supposed to belong. There are heavier parts of that story that I won’t get into, but all of it played a role in why I was as depressed as I was.

By the time I got into my teenage years it only got worse. I left home as soon as I was able to and I didn’t turn back. For a long time I thought my upbringing was just another version of normal, that is just what I was used to and what I was made to believe. It wasn’t until I started having conversations with other people and hearing them talk about their childhoods that I realized something was off. When I would chime in and share parts of mine, I would get these strange looks that I didn’t understand at the time. It took me a while to realize those reactions were because what I experienced was not normal at all. I didn’t come to that realization on my own, other people made me see it. After that, I stopped sharing. It was easier to keep it to myself than to explain something I didn’t want to revisit or have people ask questions about.

As I got older, I learned how to manage the depression, or really just keep it at a distance. As long as I surrounded myself with good people and stayed busy, I was okay for the most part. But certain conversations would still pull me right back into that mindset, especially anything about family or childhood. When people would talk about how great their upbringing was, or even when someone would say they had it bad, there was always a part of me that would internally think they had no idea. I never said it out loud, but the thought was always there. At the same time, I avoided sharing my own story because I didn’t want to open that door.

Then I started working at Haymount.

Part of my job involved going through intake paperwork and reading the reasons why people were coming in for help. I expected to see difficult situations, that comes with the field, but I was not prepared for the level of what I was about to read. You hear about things happening in the world, but it is very different when you are reading it directly in front of you. Kids under the age of 15 being sex trafficked. Parents sexually assaulting their own children. Situations that are hard to process, let alone understand.

It forces you to stop and think.

Working at an outpatient mental health facility will make you realize that no matter how bad you think your life is, or even how bad it actually was, there are people out there going through things that are truly unimaginable. And what stood out to me the most was not just what these kids had been through, but how they carried themselves. You would expect someone to be completely broken after experiencing things like that, but a lot of them still show up, still push forward, and still try to live their lives.

That is what changed my perspective.

It didn’t take away from my past and it didn’t invalidate what I went through. I did have it bad, and that is the truth of it. But it made me realize that I have no reason to go through life stuck in that place mentally. Seeing a 12 year old who has been through more than most people could even imagine and still finding a way to keep going puts things into perspective very quickly.

It was humbling in a way that is hard to explain unless you have seen it yourself.

I started to realize that I had been holding onto my past in a way that was no longer serving me. Not in an obvious way, not in a way people could easily see, but internally it was still there shaping how I thought and how I felt. Working at Haymount forced me to look at that differently. It shifted my mindset from feeling stuck in what I went through to recognizing that it is something I went through, not something I have to stay in.

At the end of the day, it made me more aware, more grounded, and more appreciative of where I am now. My past is still a part of me, but it does not define me in the same way anymore.

It is just something I came from, not something that controls where I am going.