When Healing Became Another Battle

HOF — Last year I hit rock bottom. Depression had been with me for years—maybe decades—but in November 2024 it finally broke me. I couldn’t work anymore. I couldn’t do anything anymore. Life turned gray and meaningless, and all I wanted was a way out.

Only then did I realize how badly I needed help. After ten years of paying into German health insurance, I finally asked for it. My GP searched the region for clinics until one in Rehau accepted me. I thought I was about to be rescued. Instead, I entered a system under severe strain.

There was no psychotherapy, no daily program—just an inpatient ward with fluorescent lights and uncomfortable beds. They asked few questions and relied heavily on standardized surveys. Because I was Syrian, an expat in German suburbia, a worker from Amazon, and—perhaps most confusing of all—“well behaved,” my depression was assessed as mild. Their solution was medication. My wish was therapy. The compromise was one short session per week, tied to a prolonged inpatient stay.

I left, disillusioned but still desperate.

For the next ten months, I tried to heal myself. I quit Amazon, started journaling every day, cut and stitched leather with my hands, tried to give shape to time. It helped—but only partially. Eventually I returned to the clinic, this time prepared to try medication.

They gave me mirtazapine. A small dose steadied my sleep and softened the edge of my anxiety. It didn’t spark creativity, but it gave me enough calm to hold a pen again.

The real turning point came with the fall of Assad—an event I had both feared and longed for in equal measure. Relief collided with dread, and at first I was too broken to write anything new. But when I opened my old notebooks from the hopeful spring of 2011, I found a voice worth reviving. With ChatGPT as my editor and companion, I turned those raw notes into Lessons from a Forgotten Revolution.

From 2016 to 2024, my blog had been one long scream into the void—The Gray Devil in Me, Broken by Heart, Crossing through Inferno, Roadmap to the Abyss. After Assad’s fall, that scream began to take shape. The medication made it possible to sit still long enough, but it was history itself—and the unexpected partnership with an AI—that pulled me back into writing.

I had feared ChatGPT as a rival, a machine that might erase the human writer. But I realized it was an editor, not a usurper. It carved my chaos into clarity, made my scars into sentences, forged my pain into something like steel. Writing Forged by Fire helped me embrace my past traumas and scars as parts of myself. Writing Damascus Brutalist Legacy helped me grieve my homeland. Writing When God Plays Dice with the Universe helped me step outside grief altogether.

Then came my psychiatrist’s “next pill.”
Venlafaxine.

And then—perfect timing—an old friend named Hope reappeared, reminding me of a line I had once written:

“The universe—always expanding, always exploding, always falling apart. Humans try to hold little pieces together. We’re afraid of change, afraid of failure. But when we refuse change, change still comes—and we adapt.”

Within ten days, I was on fire—not reckless, not doing anything foolish, but alive in a way I hadn’t been in years. My mind was energized, creative, always moving. For the first time in a long while, I had the energy to write again. My diary filled with words that weren’t just cries into the void but fragments of meaning.

Sleep fell away, but instead of collapsing, I kept creating, kept helping, kept moving. It wasn’t just happiness; it was momentum—a current that carried me into long walks, conversations, even moments of unexpected warmth. Later I would learn there’s a name for this state: hypomania—a surge of light and motion that feels like freedom but lives close to an edge.

What Hope’s message stirred—and what the medication amplified—lit me up. Those around me became concerned. Out of care, emergency services were called.

In the hospital, under harsh lights and deep exhaustion, my thoughts resisted neat sentences. In frustration, I resorted to metaphor the only way I knew how. For me, a graduate of literature, it was symbolic. In a clinical setting, it was recorded differently. Mania was mentioned. Bipolar was written into the chart.

This time the medication was heavier: risperidone, then aripiprazole at 20 mg. What followed was agony—flatness, restlessness, body pain, joylessness. After weeks of inpatient life, I pushed for reduction. I am now at 5 mg, back home, waiting for my system to recover.

The irony is that during my first hospital stay earlier that year, I had mentioned that bipolar disorder ran in my family. I had wondered about it myself. At the time, it wasn’t explored. Later, medication became the primary response again, without much curiosity about distinctions.

So here I am: forged in Syria’s war, strained inside Germany’s systems, stitched together with words and leather, scarred but still alive. I no longer wait for collapse. I write through it. And if healing is another battle, then writing remains my frontline.

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Relevant links
Forged by Fire