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.
My experience came from that job. Yours comes from something else entirely — a different trigger, a different story, a different moment where something broke open. But the mechanism of what follows: the shame, the silence, the mask, the slow erosion of everything that used to hold you together — that part is the same. And so is the way the people around you suffer alongside you, quietly, without anyone meaning it to happen.
It took me six years to become functional. Three more to begin to understand what had actually happened and what I could do with it. I am not the person I was before this started — I never will be — but I am better for having been through it. The PTSD is behind me. The depression no longer defines my days.
Many people who come through something like this choose to keep their distance from it afterwards. That is not weakness — it is self-knowledge, and it is earned. I made a different choice. I found that I could sit with someone in the darkest part of their own version of this, understand them completely, and walk away whole. Not because I studied it. Because I lived it. And because I know the difference between being in it and standing beside it.
That is what I am building this for.
I am not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. I have no clinical qualifications. What I have is years of living through this, and 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.
I will be adding content to this library regularly — honest, plain-language writing about what depression and PTSD actually feel like from the inside, what they do to relationships, and what has been shown to help. Not to replace professional support, which is always the right first step. But because I know that not everyone has access to that, and because sometimes what you need first is simply to feel understood by someone who has been there.
If something is feeling heavy right now and you don't know where to put it, I built Dear Hope for exactly that moment.
You can also find BB Hope on Facebook and YouTube — I'll be sharing more there as this grows.
You are not as alone in this as it feels.