This is the story I never thought I’d write. For years, I kept my childhood locked away. Too painful, too messy, too raw to share.
But if my story can help even one student realize they’re not alone, then it’s worth telling.
The Early Years
I grew up in rural Maryland.
My dad was a scientist working in the biochemistry industry, and his salary allowed my mom to stay home with me during my early years.
That time with my mom was both a blessing and a curse.
On one hand, I’ll always treasure how she did her best to care for me. She was capable of being a tremendously loving and caring mother.
I was an only child, and she knew I was lonely growing up in farm country with no nearby kids my age, so she took it upon herself to plan special day trips together.
Most of our time together was spent in the car. She’d take me to the library where I would check out a bunch of books, then I’d sit in the backseat reading while she drove us to the arcade or to the mini-golf course. Sometimes we’d spend hours having conversations as she drove.
Mom did her best to fill the gaps that isolation created.
But my mom also suffered from type I bipolar and schizophrenia, which made our time together deeply unpredictable.
She would be loving and kind one minute, and then aggressively angry the next, yelling, digging her fingernails into my shoulder, even hitting me.
It wasn’t unusual for her to start hysterically crying after one of these outbursts, sobbing uncontrollably into her hands, with me next to her, often confused about what just happened.
My earliest memories aren’t of birthday parties or family vacations — they’re of confusion, walking on eggshells, and learning to read the emotional temperature of the house by carefully studying the microexpressions on my parents’ faces.
I became hypervigilant, always scanning for signs of what might come next.
I didn’t have a reference for “normal”.
Honestly, I thought what I was experiencing was normal.
Is that not how most families lived?
Keep Your Head Down
My dad’s advice was simple: “Keep your head down.”
When mom had episodes, fights would start.
They didn’t wait until I was out of the house, or retreat to their bedroom behind closed doors to argue in muffled tones.
There were no boundaries when they fought.
Screaming matches echoed through our small house.
Dishes would shatter against the wall or floor.
Sometimes there was domestic violence and panicked screams to call 911.
When their arguments turned loud and violent, I would retreat to my room or hide in the basement.
I wouldn’t cry or show emotion.
I’d just wait for it to pass, silently listening to every word, absorbing every emotion, feeling the instability pulse through the walls.
Dad’s advice was well-meaning, born from his own survival instinct. He didn’t want me to become the target of one of mother’s eruptions. Stay low, stay quiet, don’t engage.
He bore the brunt of most episodes, doing his best to shield me, even when it didn’t feel like protection at the time.
In many ways, it was very self-sacrificial of my dad, and I love him for the protection he tried to offer.
But the “keep your head down” advice came at a cost.
I learned to make myself small, to swallow my voice, to become invisible.
I didn’t know then that I was learning how to survive rather than live.
Building Walls, Building Forts
As a child, I became a master fort-builder, although not for the reasons most little kids build forts.
I’d transform the entire basement with sheets, pillows, and cardboard blocks, creating elaborate hideaways where I could disappear for hours at a time.
My parents thought I had dreams of becoming an architect, but really, I was just trying to build myself a safe space in a world that constantly felt unpredictable and emotionally unstable.
When overwhelm hit, which happened multiple times per week, I would lie face-down on the floor of my fort and shake uncontrollably for five to ten minutes at a time.
My vision would blur and it felt like I was leaving my body.
Sometimes I would cry, but mostly I felt numb.
During those shaking episodes, I couldn’t feel anything at all.
In some twisted way, it actually felt good, like I was getting a break, a reprieve from the constant hypervigilance that I could never seem to turn off.
I thought this shaking was normal.
I thought every kid laid down on the floor and shook uncontrollably when life got too overwhelming.
Eventually, the shaking would stop and I’d return to my body.
The crushing weight would lift from my chest.
Breathing would become easier.
I couldn’t explain it at the time, but my head somehow felt more calm, more clear.
Then I’d go back to playing in my fort, coloring or playing Game Boy, waiting for the next wave to hit.
In my early 30s, I learned that this type of behavior is called dissociation, and is a common trauma response for young children growing up in unstable homes.
My young brain was protecting me the only way it knew how.
The Winter Everything Went Dark
When I was eleven and twelve, our house was disintegrating.
Mom’s episodes were becoming more frequent, more intense, and more violent.
My parents’ fights devolved into screaming matches, typically with one of them storming out and driving off for hours at a time.
The word “divorce” hung in the air like smoke after a carpet bombing.
The winter of 2000, mom was hospitalized in the psychiatric ward. This was back when mental health was even more stigmatized than it is now.
We lived in rural farm country, and anything related to mental illness was considered shameful.
Complicating matters was the fact that her parents (my grandparents) were very secretive about these types of things.
I was told not to talk about it.
Only myself, my dad, and my grandparents knew the true extent of my mother’s mental health.
Mom was heavily medicated that winter, a shell of herself, and spent her days and nights at the psychiatric ward.
I saw her once, in December, for my twelfth birthday. She was allowed out of the ward for the day, and myself and my parents sat around the dim light of the kitchen table, a solitary candle on my birthday cake.
Mom was completely catatonic — eyes glazed over, softly rocking back and forth, unable to talk or comprehend what was going on.
It was the worst birthday I had ever experienced, I just wanted things to be “normal” (whatever that meant).
In early 2001, the hospital released my mom. But things were different. She wasn’t the same.
While she wasn’t having as many outbursts, she felt flat, like she really wasn’t “there”.
It was a little scary and eerie. By this point my hypervigilance was a finely tuned instrument, and I could tell the state of her mental health just from the steps she took on the floorboards above my room.
The Day Everything Shattered
At the end of sixth grade, my mom chaperoned our class field trip to Gettysburg, PA. It was one of those suffocating hot, humid days where the air felt thick enough to choke on.
I spent most of the day with my friends and Shannon, my first girlfriend, more interested in impressing her than staying by my mom’s side. I think that hurt my mom — she was so used to to me being her silent companion. This was the first time she saw me growing up, witnessing me becoming interested in girls, and perhaps not needing her as much as I used to.
When we returned to school that afternoon, something felt viscerally wrong the moment we walked to the car. My hypervigilance, finely tuned after years of survival, screamed danger.
Her gait was off.
There was a hollow, withdrawn quality to her eyes that went beyond the usual post-hospital medicated emptiness.
The silence around her felt different.
Heavier, more final.
At twelve years old I was used to sitting in the front seat of the car, but that day I climbed in the backseat.
Some primal instinct told me that it wasn’t safe to sit upfront. Truth be told, I was afraid she might yell at me for spending too much time with Shannon, and then try to hit me.
Exhausted from the heat, I fell asleep as we drove home.
Then the World Exploded
I was jolted awake to the blaring of a car horn, felt our car swerving, crossing the yellow line into incoming traffic.
In that split second of terror, my only thought was:
“It’s okay, mom will save us.”
She didn’t.
We slammed head-on into an oncoming car at 50 mph.
Time shattered.
I was thrown forward, then whipped backward as our car spun, giving me such an intense case of whiplash that I still suffer from neck problems today.
The sound of crunching metal filled my ears.
The smell of melting rubber and gasoline invaded my lungs.
Glass exploded everywhere as the airbags deployed, driving razor sharp shards into my mom’s face.
The woman we hit was only 20 years old. She was pregnant. The impact nearly severed her arm and almost killed her unborn child.
As I crawled from the wreckage to a nearby house to call 911, I felt that something terrible had just happened, that the world would no longer be the same, and from this point on, not only would life be different, but I would different too.
I sat on the roadside, disoriented, in a state of shock. My body into complete dorsal vagal shutdown, becoming totally numb, nothing felt real — a state that I would be stuck in for almost twenty years.
I watched the paramedics fight to save both my mother and this poor young woman whose only mistake was being in the wrong place at exactly the wrong time. Sometimes I think of her and her child, and hope they are okay — in many, many ways, her trauma was far worse than what my mother and I endured.
Before they loaded me onto the stretcher, my mom regained consciousness, and through a blood soaked rag held up to her disfigured face, kept repeating, over and over, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Everything I thought I knew about my mother, my family, my future…all of it died in that twisted metal on Clear Ridge Rd.
Physically, I recovered from the accident and resumed attending school.
But mentally, something fundamental had broken inside of me.
I had played sports all my life until then, but after the accident, I stopped caring. The easy laughter of my jock friends suddenly felt hollow, their jokes stupid and immature.
How could anyone laugh when the world was this dangerous, this unpredictable, at your very own mother could cause such pain and suffering?
I couldn’t go back to who I was. That version of me had died in the accident too.
The Truth I Couldn’t Face
For years, something gnawed at me about that accident. The official story never sat right — that mom had fallen asleep at the wheel, or maybe had a seizure due to her medications.
But I knew better.
Even as a twelve-year-old, some part of me sensed something deeper. I just wasn’t ready to face it.
In my early thirties, as I began processing my own mental health struggles, I started researching bipolar disorder in more depth.
The statistics I found were staggering: 30-60% of individuals with bipolar attempt suicide at least once, with 15-20% succeeding.
When I read those numbers, it finally clicked into place.
Mom had tried to kill herself.
She was drowning in so much pain that she couldn’t see another way out. She wanted it all to end: the episodes, the medications, the constant torment of living inside her fractured mind.
It’s hard to say if she even knew I was in the backseat. In her final act, I could have just been collateral damage.
The hardest part for me to accept was that my own mother, who loved me dearly, could put her own son’s life at risk to end her own.
In many ways, mom’s attempt on her life was also attempt on my life…and that’s not an easy thing to come to terms with.
Every day I’m eternally grateful for that primal instinct that made me sit in the backseat instead of beside her. Had I been in the front, I’d either be dead or carrying scars that would have made survival even harder.
That day, my mom tried to write the final chapter for both of us. Instead, she gave me the push I needed to start writing my own.
Finding Sanctuary in Code
Me as a teenager at Andrew’s house for a sleepover. We stayed up the entire night, drinking Jolt cola, writing code, and playing video games.
One of my friends, Andrew, had a dad who was a Java programmer at UPS.
Andrew’s basement was filled with old desktop computers running Linux — a dark cave of spinning hard drives and glowing CRT monitors.
I was instantly hooked.
For my thirteenth birthday, Andrew gave me three floppy disks with a minimalist distro of Slackware Linux, and scrawled a few basic commands on a napkin for me: ls, cd, and mkdir.
I remember typing those commands into the terminal and one day vowing that I would build something “cool”, though I had no idea what “cool” actually meant.
After that, I started teaching myself every programming and markup language I could find: HTML, BASIC, C/C++, Perl, PHP, Python, Java, JavaScript, even assembly.
I would beg my parents for programming books from the library or bookstore.
Once, my mom even drove me thirty miles to a university so I could buy a college-level textbook on the assembly language. At the time, my dream was to build an operating system, and in order to do that, I needed to write a boot loader in ASM.
Control in a World of Chaos
Through programming, for the first time in my life, I was able to assert control over something.
If I made a mistake in my code, the compiler would alert me to it immediately, and I could attempt to fix it. The only thing that limited me was my knowledge, and the more I learned, the better I became.
Writing code felt like magic. And now I know why — flow states.
Programming allowed me to step outside myself and into another world. All the noise and voices just turned off. It was just me and my keyboard.
It was meditation.
It was sanctuary.
It was peace.
As my home life continued to fall apart with mom’s condition worsening, my grades started slipping.
But I didn’t care.
I couldn’t be bothered with school — I was building something.
Finding My Voice
The person who believe in me most was Ms. Wood, my VOTECH programming teacher. By the time I reached her class second semester of junior year, I had been coding for almost four years.
She immediately recognized my potential and let me self-study the entire two-year course in one semester. I took the AP Computer Science exam that spring and easily earned a 5, allowing me to test out of the vast majority of intro college-level computer science courses.
Ms. Wood didn’t make me play by the rules, or try to constrain me. She noticed I was on a different path, and she cleared the way for me. And I’ll always love her for that.
She even got me my first programming job that summer at Jos. A Bank, the men’s clothing company.
That summer taught me a valuable lesson: while I enjoyed getting paid to write code, corporate life was not for me. It was too cold, too scheduled, too regimented.
On my last day at Jos. A Bank, one of the team members, who also happened to be a distant family relative, pulled me aside and told me not to come back, this place wasn’t for me, and that I could do better.
Though I hid my reaction from her, I knew deep down she was right, and I’m grateful that she pulled me aside to tell me directly — it helped affirm what I already sensed.
I drove home that final day with the windows down, punk music blasting at an obnoxiously high volume, rebellious and free.
A few weeks later I used part of my summer earnings to buy a Mac Mini, my first Apple computer. That computer became a part of me, and thrust me deeper into the world of Unix.
Writing My Own Chapter
I wish I could say that by my senior year of high school mom’s health was starting to improve.
It wasn’t.
In fact, it was getting worse.
The difference now was that I had a car. I had a girlfriend (neither of my parents approved of her, which only made me happier). I was finally starting to feel free.
I was writing my own story now. The rebellious chapter filled with youthful arrogance and testosterone.
I trusted that everything was going to work out, that I was going start a successful tech company, run it, and sell it for a lot of money.
To nineteen year old me, it was never a question of if, only when.
Call it naive optimism, but dammit, I was going to write my own chapter. I was done letting other people’s chaos define my story.
Of course, there was still chaos left for me to face…my own.
The Long Road to Healing
I won’t pretend the journey ended there. In fact, it was just beginning.
I carried my trauma with me through my twenties. My days were incredibly productive; I’d work on my PhD research, and on the company I was building.
My nights were filled with alcohol and pills.
The first five years of building my business were fueled by coffee, vodka, and Klonopin.
I was constantly trying to escape, whether through hyper-productivity, or substances.
By my late twenties, I’d stopped numbing out and started processing what was underneath. I had developed intrusive thoughts, and dealt with serious mental health challenges of my own.
But I also began to see my mom differently.
When I experienced my own dark winter of suicidal ideation, I realized:
“If I am in this much pain with all my resources, intelligence, and therapeutic support, how much worse must have it been for her?”
I developed empathy for my mom. I finally understood that what she did came from a place of pain, that she was constantly tormented, and that it was truly outside of her control. She was so sick, she couldn’t help it.
Mom and I talk regularly now, and I don’t hate her anymore.
I love her and I feel grateful for everything she did for me…including, ironically, that car accident.
Coming Full Circle
That car accident altered my life’s trajectory.
Without it, who knows if I would have gotten into computers or obsessed over programming the way I did? Without learning to code, I wouldn’t have studied computer science, earned my PhD, or build and sold a successful AI company.
In many ways, I owe my mom everything for who I am today.
Yes, there were times as a kid I wanted to die.
But I didn’t.
Those experiences, in the long run, made me stronger.
And yes, I carry scars with me daily (and I tend to be very careful about my mental health).
But everything I have now, everything that matters to me, was forged in the fire of my childhood and early teen years.
I could have let my childhood beat me. I was close to doing so with the alcohol and pills.
But I kept waking up every morning, no matter how much my head hurt from the hangover the night before, and I kept working.
I kept going. I kept moving forward. At all costs.
I always wanted to write my next chapter.
Why This Scholarship Exists
If you’ve read this far, then I assume it’s likely that you also grew up with a mentally ill parent (or at least have a close loved one in your life suffering from mental illness). I want you to know, you are not alone.
You’re not broken, and you’re not doomed to repeat your parents patterns.
Your trauma isn’t your fault, but healing becomes your responsibility as you grow up. That’s a hard, harsh truth to swallow, but it’s also empowering because it means you have agency and autonomy in writing your next chapter.
The good news is that you don’t have to do it alone. There are people, like me, who are here to help you shoulder that burden.
You can’t choose the cards you are dealt in life, but you can choose how you play them.
How are you currently playing your cards?
Maybe you found solace in coding like I did.
Maybe you’ve discovered that the structure and predicability of programming provides the control and peace that your home life never could.
Maybe you’re sitting in your room right now teaching yourself how to code, vowing that one day you’ll build something “cool”, just as I did at thirteen.
The NextChapterForward Foundation isn’t just about scholarship and money, although I hope the funds help with your education.
What it’s really about is connection.
It’s about knowing someone has walked your path before, and believes in your potential.
And, most importantly, it’s about understanding your greatest wounds can become your greatest strengths…if you’re willing to do the work.
Your past doesn’t define you. There is always a next chapter…and it’s up to you to write it.
Adrian Rosebrock
NextChapterForward, Founder
P.S. If I could go back in time and whisper one thing to my thirteen-year-old self, hiding in the basement while his parents fought and argued, it would be this:
“Buddy, I know you feel weird and strange and awkward right now. I know socializing is hard. I know you feel like you don’t fit in. I know home life hurts and you don’t feel safe. But it’s gonna work out just fine. Keep doing what you’re doing. Keep following your dreams, your intuition is spot on. Trust me. It’s amazing now.”
Ready to write your next chapter? Learn more about the scholarship, or apply now.