Fifteen. Looking back, I can't pinpoint one specific event, but I distinctly remember my teenage years being turbulent, ridden with rebellion which in turn brought a lot of grief to my family. Around this time, I had  been introduced to cutting by then, and self-mutilation become something that seemed to bring emotional soothing. My hands, legs and face. Metallic compasses, cheap razor blades and knives were my weapons of choice. That's where it first began, at least as far as is clear in memory. I can't remember what triggered it, but in the middle of the night after a trivial argument, I picked up a box of painkillers and consumed them all.  What lay ahead was me sprawled across my bathroom floor, trying to throw up and my mum endeavoring to get me to chug a glass of milk to neutralize the poison I had just ingested. This was followed by a hospital run with me lying across the backseat of a car, and then me puking my guts out all over the emergency room at the hospital. A mandated counselor was assigned to me following this event. I would like to say that that was the last time I attempted to commit suicide. But between 15 and 20, I had tried to drown myself in a pool, guzzled several bottles of syrup, knocked my head against a concrete wall repeatedly and wandered a street plastered alone at night — all attempts to end my life and bring closure to the sense of worthlessness and emptiness I carried.

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Sixteen. I began running away a few times as a teen, in the heat of the rebel I'd become and trying to escape a complex tapestry of a desire for freedom and adventure as well as a manifestation of anger and pain. My parents became the ones to begin the search for my whereabouts on several occasions, with old friends, their parents, and in school offices. I was the one every parent warned their daughters to keep off, and I increasingly became the one whispered about at family gatherings.

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Seventeen. Alcohol became a part of my life, almost exclusively for social purposes. Over the next few years, I became a sloppy and emotional drunk. I carried such a cumbersome sense of worthlessness, battled with my identity, and turned to fashion modeling to gain acceptance. It promised a short term sense of recognition. I felt celebrated, noticed, and wanted. But this, I discovered, over the years, became a gateway to such a depth of compromise, completely losing myself to the culture of that world. My moral compass was dissipating, and any whisper of conviction I had left from growing up in a religious home grew fainter as I got older, moved away from home for college and stopped going to church.

Nineteen. My drinking turned from occasional social drinking to regular drinking. It was a big part of the culture of the college I went to, a drink after class, drink in between classes, drink after class and nightcaps at our apartments. Mondays were for making plans for the parties and clubs over the upcoming weekend and weekends began on Thursdays. Night after night, we’d go out. It was all the same. Same music, same guys, same girls, same cycles of guys trying to pick up girls for the night and the same couples in the corner of the club or on the street curb getting into a public fight. The cycle was the same, waking up with empty pockets for the men and sometimes fuller pockets for the girls, from guys who’d give money to buy yourself whatever drinks you wanted. Same crowds. Same old same old.  I’ll be honest and say for a while, it was fun, but over time this became a dysfunctional life. Looking back, I feel like we were all looking for something, and none of us was 100% honest with each other about the real weight of pain or confusion we had about ourselves, our families or our relationships.

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I was a deeply broken teenager with an identity crisis, an orphan spirit and battled with rejection and acceptance for years. By my 20th birthday I’d began getting weary of the lifestyle. I was a lot more inwardly broken than I appeared and it was getting harder and harder to put up a front that everything was okay. In many ways, I unintentionally cut and hurt whoever came too close to me with all the broken pieces I was carrying.

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Failing miserably at school was the beginning of my undoing. I first went to college when I was 17. Up and till then, I was a decent student and was academically competitive through high school. By my third year of college, my GPA was at 1.7. This led to a mandatory meeting between the Dean of the College of Business, my father and I. The threat of getting kicked out of college became a greater reality. Places of deep pain were exposed within that meeting, and the issues that had been heavy on my heart unraveled most messily within that office. I’d like to say I went into counseling then, but I didn’t. What followed over those years was more masking of weighty issues, more hiding a toxic relationship with a filter of perfection and more partying to stifle all the voices continually going off in my head. A long term relationship came to an end, compounded by academic failure and a strained relationship with my family. My world came crumbling down and something within me snapped and depression began to set in.

For a while, I’d attempted to fill that void with surrounding myself with a lot of people, more partying and ditching class. I distanced myself from the people who I knew would call me out and kept company with acquaintances I knew would let me live this YOLO life. At least that's what we called it back then. Alcohol was my greatest source of comfort and I quickly escalated from social drinking into alcohol dependency to get through the day. Whenever I had a bad day, be it six o'clock in the evening or 11 a.m., I had a ‘break in case of emergency’ bottle of Napoleon, ‘Naps’ as we affectionately called it. I carry distinct memories of drinking the whole bottle, smashing it against the wall and cutting myself with the shards of glass, of drinking and wandering a street at night by myself and other emergency room episodes. I'd become numb. I was searching for who I really was, in every party, every photo shoot and music video shoot and in every guy that took an interest in me. It's incredible how much pain you can mask behind a cute outfit, a pair of heels, some makeup, and a smile. I’d slowly began having questions and began feeling that there had to be more to life. Those thoughts consumed me as I stared at the ceiling at 6.30am when we had just gotten back to the apartment from the club after partying all night, and when my companions were passed out drunk.

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I knew the 'I can do all things’, 'God has a purpose' and a ton of verses here, but I didn't live for God, and I had stayed off church for as long as I had lived away from my parents. I didn't think I could be forgiven or start over, and I knew I would be judged for the life I had lived. There was such an overwhelming roar of emptiness and that I thought I’d find peace by modeling. I thought applause and compliments would fix me. But they didn't. They weren't enough. I would draw strength from verses I saw on Facebook and things I remembered on who we had always been taught God was. People I partied with and went to college with had begun dying, from bad weed trips, car accidents, and other deaths related to the lifestyle we lived. I remember being in a car accident with no recollection of that night's activities but knowing so clearly that these were warnings of what was ahead if something in my life didn't change soon.