I spent ten years as an emergency medical dispatcher for the ambulance service. Ten years of receiving people at the worst moments of their lives, staying calm, and moving on to the next call.
What that job did to me over time is what brought me here.
I developed PTSD and depression. Not dramatically, not all at once — quietly, the way these things usually arrive. The things that used to work stopped working. Sleep went. Joy went. The person my colleagues and my wife knew became a mask I wore to get through the day, while something underneath it slowly came apart.
I experienced suicidal ideation. I engaged in self-harm. I used alcohol to quiet what I couldn't silence any other way. I am not going to detail any of that — this is not a roadmap, it is a credential. What I want you to understand is simply that I have been in the places that feel the most unreachable. And I know, from the inside, what it takes to believe there is no way back.
It took me six years to become functional again.
Then came something longer — five years of coming back to normal, and I'm still in it. The PTSD is behind me now. The depression isn't, not entirely — there are still small elements of it that haven't gone, and I've stopped expecting them to. This has been the period where I've done the real reflecting, the real understanding of what happened to me and why. And somewhere in the early part of it, I started helping other people who were where I had been. Later, as I understood more, I started helping the people who loved them — the carers, the ones nobody thinks to ask how they're doing.
How this actually started
Not with a plan. With two rejection letters.
I'd applied for a few jobs online, the kind of ordinary thing you do when you're rebuilding. Two rejections came back, close together. And instead of doing anything useful with that feeling, I started writing. Not for anyone. Just journals — getting down what I was thinking, what I remembered, what I was starting to understand about the years I'd just been through.
Those journals didn't stay journals. They became a memoir.
Three-quarters of the way through writing it, something clicked into place that I hadn't planned for. I realised how many people don't get the help they need — and that there's a whole group of people who barely get acknowledged at all. Carers. The ones holding everything together while everyone's attention goes to the person who's unwell. And I started noticing a third group too, newer, not catered for anywhere yet: people whose sense of who they are has been knocked sideways by AI.
I'd been watching this build for a while before I named it. People who'd spent twenty, thirty years getting genuinely good at something — writing, design, analysis, code — quietly starting to wonder what they were actually for, as AI got close enough to what they did to make the question feel real instead of theoretical. Nobody was calling that grief. But that's what it looked like from where I was standing. The same shape as everything else I'd seen — just a different cause.
Three different groups. But underneath, the same mechanism. Anxiety. A level of depression. And at the centre of all of it, loss of identity — the sense of not quite knowing who you are anymore once the thing that defined you has gone.
I'd been through loss of identity twice. I'd lived the depression and the anxiety myself. And I'd been the carer too. I had an implicit understanding of all three groups, not from study, but from having stood inside each one. That's when I stopped thinking about building something just for PTSD and depression, and decided to build a holding place for all three.
If that's you — if trauma took your sense of who you are, or depression did, or caring for someone else did, or watching your work get quietly replaced did — you're not in the wrong place. This is exactly who I built this for.
What BB Hope actually is
I'd been using AI seriously for about eighteen months by that point, and I could see what it could do well and where it could quietly go wrong for someone in a vulnerable state. So I built AI guides — one for people living with PTSD and depression, one for the people caring for them — each with a specific setup and behavioural pattern designed around how a vulnerable person actually needs to be met, not how a generic AI assistant happens to respond by default.
There are fifteen articles planned for the Library here, covering the ground those two groups — and the third, newer one — actually live in. I'm working through them now, alongside everything else.
And before any of that, there was Dear Hope.
Dear Hope
Dear Hope is a small private ritual — write what you're carrying, and send it in the hope that whatever you believe is out there will receive it, and witness you. $2.99.
I built it because it's something I'd wished I'd had myself, for a long time. Just a place to put something down — your hopes, your fears, the thing that's too heavy to say out loud — and release it toward something, whatever you believe that something is, in the hope it's heard.
I wanted it to feel like a ritual. Like you're genuinely parting with whatever you're carrying, not just typing it into a form. The first version didn't get that right — it dropped you straight onto a blank page, and that's not how parting with something heavy actually feels. So I built an entrance instead: it eases you in, announces itself slowly, before it ever asks you to write anything. And because there's a small cost involved, it felt wrong to leave someone with nothing afterward — like sending something into the dark with no sense it arrived. So there's a response. The first ones I built didn't feel right either, and I scrapped them. It took about six weeks to land on something that actually reads what you've written, understands what's underneath it, and answers in an old-world, mythical register — not a generic one.
Dear Hope has been live for three months now, while I've been building the rest of this around it — the website, the guides, the research, the planning. And I'll be honest: I've used it myself, more than once, in that time. There have been days where this has felt like an absolute mountain, building all of it alone.
It's starting to come together now, though. Most of the research is done. The articles are planned, even if most of them still need to be written over the coming weeks. The memoir needs polishing, but it exists. The website has been through five different versions, and this one is the one I'm keeping.
I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. I have no clinical qualifications. What I have is years of living through this, everything I learned on the other side of it, and twenty years of being the person people confide in — first professionally, then voluntarily, now by design.
If something is heavy right now and you don't know where to put it, that's exactly what Dear Hope is for.
Or if you'd rather read first, the Library is where I'm putting everything I'm learning and have learned, for sufferers, for carers, and for anyone whose sense of who they are has been shaken loose.