I spent ten years as an Emergency Medical Dispatcher with Queensland Ambulance Service in Australia. Ten years of taking emergency calls. Of listening to screaming, crying, begging. Of staying calm while someone on the other end of the line was not. Of resetting, taking the next call, and staying calm again.
I was good at it. My colleagues knew me by my nickname. That person was funny, steady, someone who lifted the room. Every shift, I became that person. Every shift, I wore the mask.
Inside, something was dying.
I remember standing at a noticeboard at work one day, looking at a poster. It listed the signs and symptoms of PTSD and anxiety. I read through every single one of them.
I laughed at myself. I had every symptom on that list. And I thought: that's not me. I'm fine.
At home, I couldn't sleep. My marriage had become cold and distant — not because either of us wanted that, but because I had no capacity to explain what was happening inside me. I didn't have the words. I barely had the understanding. I just knew that the things that used to bring me joy had quietly stopped working, one by one, until there was nothing left that reached me.
I looked around the room at work — at my colleagues, their smiling faces, getting on with it — and I thought: why am I so weak? Why is no one else suffering? What does that say about me?
So I wore the mask tighter. I tried harder to make people laugh. I worked harder to hide the thing that was eroding what was left of me.
I didn't know that the people around me were doing exactly what I was doing. I didn't know that the mask I was wearing was the same mask half the room was wearing. I couldn't see it. Depression doesn't let you see it.
I had a conversation with some paramedics once, in a moment where I felt safe enough to admit something. I told them I thought I might be starting to get PTSD. They looked at me and said: how do you get that from a phone call?
That conversation stayed with me for years. It was proof — more proof for the case that was building inside me — that what I was experiencing was not real suffering. It was weakness. Personal, specific, shameful weakness.
By the time I stopped working, I had stopped sleeping in the bed. I would sit on the cold timber floor of the house instead of the couch, because I had decided I did not deserve comfort. I had decided I did not deserve basic kindness. When I went to work and made a mistake on a call — lost my patience for a moment, had a bitter thought I was disgusted by — I called the compliance officer and told them I needed to be punished. That I wasn't good enough. That they needed to find what I had done wrong.
They found nothing. My manager called and was kind. I felt rage at the kindness. I didn't believe it. I couldn't.
It took six years of treatment before the nightmares stopped. Six years before I could begin to believe I might be a decent person.
What finally moved the needle was not a therapy session. It was not a clinical breakthrough. It was an elderly person handing me a coffee and telling me they had baked me a cake — because of a small kindness I had shown them the week before. It was the look on their face. A thank you that had no agenda, no complexity, no conditions.
The voice inside me had no argument for that. It could not absorb it and turn it into evidence against me. It just had to sit with it.
That is what slowly changed things. Small, unambiguous moments of being seen by someone who had no reason to lie.
I am eleven years on from where this started. I believe, now, that I am a decent person. That doesn't mean every day is certain. There are still mornings where the old doubt surfaces. There are still moments on a good day where I suddenly feel ordinary in a way that has an edge to it. But the foundation holds. Most of the time, the foundation holds.
I built Dear Hope because I know what it is to carry something with nowhere to put it.
I know what it is to believe that you are uniquely, specifically broken — that the people around you are managing something you cannot manage, and that this is evidence of a fundamental flaw in you rather than the nature of an illness.
I know what shame does to recovery. It adds years. It makes you reject the kindness that might reach you. It keeps you on the floor when the couch is right there.
What I wish I had known — what took years of treatment and research and writing a book to understand — is that I was never alone in it. Not for a single day. The room was full of people wearing the same mask. I just couldn't see them, and they couldn't see me, because that is exactly what this illness does.
Dear Hope is not therapy. It is not a replacement for professional support. It is a place to put what you are carrying when you don't know where else to put it. A place that already knows you are not the first person to carry it. A place where you will not be judged, because the person who built it has been where you are.
And if you take nothing else from this: you are not as alone in this as it feels. The numbers say so. Eleven years of living through it say so.
You are not uniquely broken. You are not weak. You are carrying something heavy, and you have been carrying it for a long time, and you deserve somewhere to put it down.