I Died at 25 — and It Saved My Life

When I was diagnosed with a mental illness at 22, something in me decided my life was coming to an end. There was this quiet certainty that I would be dead by 25.

Self-Destruction, Self-Care and Preparing for the End

That belief did two things: it justified the self-destructive patterns I’d learned to survive childhood trauma, and, strangely enough, it pushed me to care for my body. I changed my diet (became a vegetarian) and started exercising more. Eating and moving weren’t gestures of hope so much as rituals that felt necessary, as if I had to show up for the part of me that wasn’t going to make it past 25.

When I was initially diagnosed, I was told I had severe depression. Two years later, this diagnosis changed to bipolar disorder type two. When I read those words, the 25-year certainty hardened. That year I did the practical things: I wrote a will, updated the beneficiaries on my life insurance policy and arranged how my pension would be paid out. I prepared to exit. I braced myself.

An Unexpected Invitation

And then it happened.

I was invited to a month-long youth leadership programme. The programme gathered the youth of Southern Africa and opened a space for dreaming, debating, and reimagining the continent. And there, in the corridors while others were drinking and having fun, I met him. The person I would later call my husband.

Our first exchange was unexpected. He asked me to make him tea. I felt insulted, he only smiled, and everyone else urged me to agree all because of the gentleness in his tone.

I remember the awkward honesty when he told me he liked me. I asked him to reconsider because society sees people like me as “crazy”. I sent him a link to my blog, a few posts about living with bipolar disorder, and told him to read before deciding how he felt.

He read. He said it didn’t change how he felt. I was stunned. Maybe he hadn’t read properly, I thought. But he had. And what he felt didn’t change.

During that month, we would sit in the hotel corridors and talk about everything and nothing. People would watch us and ask, “How long have you been together?” I would laugh because we’d only just met. It seems those around us saw what we didn’t: we fit like two halves that had once been whole.

As the programme ended, I was devastated at the thought of never seeing him again. My mind reminded me that I wouldn’t live past 25, so knowing him wouldn’t matter anyway. And yet, something new had started to take root within me: the slow, terrifying stir of falling in love. For the first time, I was beginning to see someone as a safe place, a person I could trust.

The Death That Wasn’t

But we did see each other again.

We kept talking and started to build something delicate, but real. The relationship that was birthed forced a kind of death I hadn’t expected. Not the physical end I’d prepared for, but a different, deeper dying.

At 25, part of me did die. The versions of myself that were rooted in childhood trauma (the patterns of abuse, the ways of tolerating less than I deserved, the small violences I accepted as normal) could no longer survive. The space we had created together didn’t make room for them. The relationship asked more of me: to value myself, to stop compromising on what I wanted, to hold a standard for the life I wanted to build. Old habits that had kept me alive in the past had to be left behind.

My death was a slow, sacred unmaking. The trauma-induced coping mechanisms began to crack. I grieved them, quietly, and then I let them go. In their place grew something steadier: the ability to be loved and to be loving in return.

Learning to Be Loved

He saved my life in ways I never imagined. Not with grand gestures, but simply by being the space where I could be seen fully, unapologetically, and without judgment. He showed me what it felt like to be loved and to love in return; to trust that someone would hold the most fragile parts of me with care. In his presence, I learned strength I hadn’t known I possessed, the courage to desire more for myself, and the quiet power of not compromising on who I was meant to become.

A friend later told me: “He definitely loves you; he noticed that when you’re happy, you dance.” I have a happy dance, and for a long time I didn’t even know I had one. The fact that someone saw that, and loved it, mattered.

A Different Kind of Survival

Certainty can become a sentence unless someone or something interrupts it. I was interrupted by strange, small human things: the late-night conversations, the courage to say, “I’m crazy,” the willingness of someone to stay anyway. Those interruptions pulled me forward.

You can die to the parts of you that no longer serve you and still live. Sometimes survival looks like destruction; sometimes death is the doorway to a truer life. I thought I would be gone at 25, and instead, I was found.