For 29 years I’ve been asking myself the same questions: What am I doing wrong?
What could I do better? Where does this paralyzing fear come from — the kind that keeps me inside, keeps me quiet, keeps me small?
Back then I was a college student. I already struggled with anxiety, but it wasn’t crushing me the way it does now.
In the building next to mine lived a few childhood friends. I used to stop by whenever I felt stable enough for a bit of socializing. That day, I was on my way back home. I don’t remember if I felt proud that I had a “good day”… or guilty because I felt, once again, that I hadn’t done enough.
The stairwell was quiet. The kind of quiet that felt normal — until it wasn’t.
When I reached the ground floor and stepped into the lobby, I noticed a woman standing there. I knew her by sight. She was someone who occasionally met up with a guy from our building. I didn’t say hello. I didn’t think about it. I just wanted to leave.
My hand touched the door handle — and suddenly she yanked my bag.
I froze, then turned out of instinct. She started shoving me, yelling at me, screaming something about that neighbor she was involved with. Accusing me of stealing her boyfriend. Saying she hated me. Saying she wanted to kill me.
Everything happened so fast it feels like a blur. We pushed each other. I slapped her once. In the scuffle, the bracelet on her wrist snapped — white plastic pearls rolling across the floor, bouncing everywhere.
That sound — those little beads hitting the tiles — still echoes inside me sometimes, louder than it should.
Something changed in her face as she looked at them.
Then she looked at me, trying to reach the door, and punched me. One single hit, but so hard that the side of my head slammed into a metal electrical panel on the wall.
I heard a grinding noise — metal, bone, and pure panic combined into one horrible sound.
She ran out immediately.
I didn’t. I couldn’t move. I just stood there, pressed against the wall, trying to understand what had just happened. When I finally lifted my hand to my face, blood was running from my nose and from my ear. I was afraid to look down. I was convinced I’d see pieces of my face scattered across the floor, mixed with her broken bracelet.
I stumbled outside and called 911.
The police arrived first. I remember begging them not to tell me if something was missing from my face — to wait for the paramedics. They walked back into the lobby with me. My blood was on the metal panel and smeared across the wall.
The ambulance came right after.
And so did my father.
He insisted I didn’t need the paramedics. Said he’d drive me. I was too shocked to argue. When the ambulance and police left, he told me I was “fine,” to wash my face, to stop being dramatic. He refused to take me to the hospital.
In his mind, it was my fault for being in the “wrong building” in broad daylight.
I couldn’t drive like that. So I stayed home.
The next day, I went alone to the equivalent of the medical examiner’s office. My face was swollen, one eye was barely seeing, and I walked the streets terrified, jumping at every person who passed me. I don’t remember much. They cleaned my wounds, examined me, gave me paperwork for the police.
They never found the woman who attacked me.
The neighbor claimed he knew nothing.
And that was it. The story just… floated into nothing, with no resolution. Except inside me.
Years later, I ran into that neighbor by accident. He said he had reconnected with her at some point. She’d become pregnant. The baby was born with severe cranial deformities.
He didn’t survive.
And me?
I lived.
But even now, twenty years later, my heart still jumps — the exact same way it did in that lobby.
The injuries on my skin healed.
The ones inside never did.