Melanie Castellari

I wasn’t a difficult pregnancy.But I was born into a life that didn't want me... My parents were just 18 when I arrived—teenagers trying to raise a baby while navigating chaos, domestic violence, and a constant lack of stability. Somewhere in that storm, the story formed that I made everything worse. I was told I was a “bad baby.”Too loud. Too needy. Too much.So much so that when my mom got pregnant with her third child—my brother—people cried. They offered condolences, help in getting an...

People love mentally ill folks when they don’t know we’re mentally ill. When they think the quirks are charm, the humor is personality, the “different” is something interesting instead of something stigmatized. But the second the truth is shared—medication, diagnoses, history, healing—the entire tone shifts. Suddenly every emotion is a symptom, every reaction is an episode, every boundary is a disorder acting up. People stop listening to the person and start listening to the label. And it’s...

Childhood trauma does not stay in childhood. It settles into the body. It becomes instinct. It quietly teaches us how to survive connection long before we ever learn how to feel safe inside it. We don’t grow out of trauma. We grow around it. And unless it is healed, it shapes every relationship we enter, romantic or otherwise. When love in early life was inconsistent, conditional, or required us to be smaller than we were, we did not learn what we deserved. We learned what we could endure. We...