In 2018, I was the Student Body President of a high school with 3,000 students in Utah. I was confident, surrounded by friends, and full of energy. But that year, our community was hit by a severe suicide epidemic. We lost six students in a single school year. As a student leader, I took the lead in helping our school respond and unify, but behind the scenes, I was drowning in a silent, misplaced guilt. I truly believed that if anyone should have known these students or been a better friend, it was me. I spent my evenings studying the yearbook to learn every name so no one would be left alone, but my unrealistic efforts only left me more broken when the next tragedy occurred.

I left for a mission in Finland shortly after graduation, hoping the service would help me move on from the pain. Instead, I dealt with deep depression every day for 15 months. Eventually, I reached a point where I could no longer eat or sleep, and I was advised to return home. I left behind a country and a language I loved, returning to the States broken, devastated, and alone.

By the time I started at BYU in 2020, I was entering the darkest chapter of my life. Internally, I wasn’t sure I had any friends left. I felt like a burden to everyone around me. I was trying every treatment available—medications, therapy, ketamine infusions, specialists—but I was flying blind. I had no idea what was actually helping me and what was hurting me. I didn’t understand how important it was to sleep, eat, and take the pressure off my body to let my mind heal. I felt stupid among my peers because my ability to focus was gone, and I eventually failed out of the university I had always dreamed of attending. The pain became so numb that I began to self-harm just to feel something.

By early 2022, I had lost all hope. I had written goodbye letters to my family and had a plan to end my life on February 9th, my 22nd birthday. In the final weeks of January, I began sending messages to friends saying I wouldn't be around much longer. It felt relieving to think the pain was ending. However, my mother found my journal and I was taken to the hospital.

I was admitted to the Huntsman Mental Health Institute and began Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT). It was a brutal, exhausting process that required being put under anesthesia and having seizures induced. It was long and it hurt, but I stuck with it because I felt I had nothing left to lose. The treatment had a severe impact on my memory—I lost major pieces of my life from 2020 through 2024. It was a massive sacrifice, but it was the first time I began to see glimpses of light.

For the next three years, I fought to rebuild. I worked undesirable sales jobs to pay off thousands of dollars in medical bills that had gone to collections. I learned to budget, to be disciplined, and to work for my health. I learned that life isn’t about money or looking like you have it all together—it’s about being healthy enough to love the people around you.

During my darkest nights in 2020, I wrote in my journals about how much I wished there was a product that could help me recognize what I was doing and how it affected my depression. I needed to understand how my medications worked and how my habits impacted my recovery. I created Sisu to be that tool.

People often tell me I have an incredible story about depression, but this isn't a story about depression. It is a story about hope. I want to shift the conversation from "mental health" to "mental hope." The space is full of talk about awareness and struggling, but there isn’t enough talk about the fact that healing is possible. Sisu is a platform for those who are suffering alone in the dark, offering a genuine voice and the tools to find the way out. I am asking you to believe that if you stick with it, good things will come. There are better days ahead.