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She had yet to turn 30, but the trauma of her childhood was slowly killing Naarah Pyscher.
Her mother suffered severe mental illness and was suicidal, sending Pyscher and her brothers in and out of foster care. Whenever her father was home from the Army, he was abusive.
In high school, Pyscher, now 34, escaped by studying and competing in every sport she could, taking drugs to keep her going. A scholarship away to college gave her relief, but she continued her rigorous schedule, ignoring the "You should rest" and "Are you OK?" comments.
After college, Pyscher married and discovered marathon training, where she could get lost for hours.
It was how she coped with an insidious anxiety, she said, that made her heart race, kept her up at night and gave her stomach aches. Getting high and drunk were also beguiling cures.
But Pyscher began to self-destruct. She could no longer run. She depended even more on alcohol and drugs. She stopped caring about her work as a personal trainer. She stopped caring about anything.
Within one month three years ago, she and her husband of eight years divorced, and her mom died.
"I made a choice to slowly let myself disappear," Pyscher said. "I did all I could to not feel, to not feel alive."
Pyscher remembers lying on her bed, crying, in her dark University City apartment. For the past three days, her only sustenance had been alcohol. "Is this how it's going to be?" she kept asking herself.
She decided that she had a choice. "I can live here in the darkness for the rest of my life and find ways to numb it all, or I can turn it around."
Like a semicolon instead of a period, Pyscher chose not to end her sentence; she would author a new narrative.
A month ago, she got a semicolon tattoo, joining millions of others across the globe inspired by Project Semicolon a movement dedicated to presenting hope and love to those struggling with depression, suicide, addiction and self-injury.
IF I CAN HELP
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