My mother's struggle with mental illness

She was a teacher once. Not just any teacher, but the kind who made students believe in themselves. The kind who spoke with authority, not because she demanded respect, but because she deserved it. She carried herself with dignity, with purpose. She was educated, intelligent—a woman people looked up to.

Now, people look at her different. They whisper when she passes by, they laugh when she mumbles to herself, they avoid her when she gets lost in her thoughts. 

The woman they see today is not the woman she was. And maybe that’s the hardest part. Knowing who she used to be, knowing who she could have been, and watching as the world only sees what she has become.

She wasn’t always like this. She was once full of life, full of dreams. She was a mother who worked hard to give her children a future she never had. A single mother, but never a broken one. She woke up every morning with purpose. She walked into classrooms, stood in front of blackboards, and shaped minds. She took pride in her work, in the knowledge she passed down. 

At home, she did her best. She wasn’t perfect. No mother is. But she loved fiercely. She fought for us, provided for us; wanted the best for us.

Then, little by little, everything started changing.It didn’t happen overnight. At first, it was just exhaustion. She would forget small things—where she put her keys, what day it was, the names of her students. Nothing too alarming. Just life. Just stress.

Then came the paranoia. She believed people were talking about her, even when they were not. She heard whispers in rooms that were silent. She thought her colleagues were plotting against her, her students mocking her.

The school noticed. Meetings were missed. Lessons were left unfinished. She was losing control, and the people around her could see it. And one day, they told her she couldn’t teach anymore.Losing that job wasn’t just losing a paycheck. It was losing herself.

Mental illness doesn’t get better when life gets harder. It feeds on pain, on loneliness, on the things no one wants to talk about. 

Without work, without structure, she started slipping further. Some days, she wouldn’t get out of bed. Other days, she would talk too fast, her mind running ahead of her words. And then there were the worst days—the ones where she wasn’t there at all, where she was just a body moving through the world without seeing it.

The neighbors noticed. They started whispering. People avoided her, crossing the road when they saw her coming. 

No one asked what happened. No one wanted to understand. The world is cruel to people like her. Society does not know what to do with mothers who lose themselves. A woman with an unstable mind is no longer seen as a woman, just a problem no one wants to deal with. But she is still here.

There are days when she remembers. Days when she talks about the past as if it’s still real, as if she could wake up tomorrow and walk back into a classroom like nothing ever happened. There are days when she is just a mother again. When she asks how I’m doing, when she holds my hand like she used to when I was little, when she looks at me and I know—she sees me.

Those days remind me that she is still in there, somewhere.

And maybe, just maybe, someday all this will be gone. Maybe one day, my story will change.At the end of the day, she is still my mother.

Inspired by true story.