Snowflakes suspended in the air like a frozen mist, transcending time itself – and for a moment, the world was silent. I took comfort in the way the street lamps illuminated them, warm and enveloping in the cold November air.

I was seventeen years old, staring out the windows of the psychiatric ward in our local hospital. In the corner of my room stood a tall cabinet bolted to the wall. Between it and the windows, a gap just large enough for me to sit with my knees pressed tightly to my chest. The windows extended floor to ceiling, handprints of my predecessor inches from my face. She had been here, too. Watched the lazy flakes of snow through the criss-cross filaments in the glass as they swooned into the streets below. Yellow lamplight so gentle and soft, a fleeting beauty before my eyes that coaxed me into disoriented reverie. My story was told here, but it was not theirs to tell.

The hours came and went, dissolving like a cold winter’s breath. On the second day I was handed a small journal with a rubber pencil and a condiment cup containing an Ativan.

“Whatever you want to write, it’s private – we won’t read it.”

For hours I stared in swirling disdain at the emptiness of the page before me. The truth was there – just beneath the surface of the waves and the storm above, vying for its chance to breach into the cold wintry air. In a slow, breathless moment, I wrote his name on the page and nothing more. I watched the sun’s shadow move across the paper until the letters became illegible and the room descended into quiet darkness once more. Another paper cup, another Ativan.

The morning after, I was confronted by my own truth — the name on the page, the same one they’d found in the articles online. It broke the comfort of my icy submergence and forced me to face the world above. I sat in a drug-induced haze while the psychiatrist’s words bore through me in the confines of a grey, windowless therapy room. I sat opposite him on a plastic bench; my back pressed against the wall as his voice echoed in the nothingness around us. His words were brittle and emotionless. I was merely the subject of psychiatric curiosity and inquisition – but I was not ill enough to receive the diagnosis.

“You just don’t fit the criteria for someone who has been abused, and we have other patients who actually need help”.

His tone was flat and uninterested. I was just one of many to pass through this empty room, having my secrets eviscerated and discarded before being dismissed to make room for the next. I thought of the handprints on my window, imagined her there in the snow-covered streets below – lamplight drifting in the fragments of a lifetime shattered all around.

And I was her, too.