Hey everyone. Nice to meet you here.

I first learned about this project when I was 19.
When I turned 20, I got my first tattoo, on the day I decided to face everything I had been avoiding.

Today, I think I am finally ready to show up and say this out loud:
I am ready to restart my life.

I want to share my story here.
It might be a little long, because it is about my whole life.
To be honest, I never really knew where it was safe to tell this story, or how to talk about my feelings.
But today, I found this place, and I thought… maybe this is it.

So I will start now.
Thank you for being here and for listening.

My name is Star. I am 26 years old this year.
I was diagnosed with Bipolar I Disorder in 2019, when I was 19.

Technically, my first diagnosis was severe depression with moderate anxiety.
At the time, my behavior matched that diagnosis almost perfectly.
Later, around 2021 or 2022 (I’m sorry, I don’t remember the exact year), my diagnosis was updated.

When I first received the diagnosis, I cried loudly on a hospital bench.
Not because I felt sorry for myself, but because everything suddenly made sense.

Throughout my teenage years, mental health was never talked about.
So I believed that everything was my fault.
Being bullied, betrayed, isolated, entering a “puppy love” relationship and being treated as disposable, being told that I “just lacked love”…
I thought it all happened because I was a bad person.
I even believed I was selfish bastard.

My parents divorced when I was born because they did not love each other.
My birth was also accompanied by the death of my grandfather, which made me an “ominous” presence in the family.

My clearest memories are from before the age of six, when I lived in different relatives’ homes.
Throughout elementary school, my nights were filled with drunken arguments and fights.

The violence was not directed at me, but I was still hurt.
I was pushed down the stairs during fights.
Once, I even jumped out of a window to chase after an uncle who had run away.

Most of the time, I was like an invisible ghost in that house.
I did my homework alone, watched cartoons alone, and even signed my own school report cards.

After junior high school, I began living with my father.
He was always busy.
We rarely ate at the same table and barely communicated.
Sometimes he introduced me to his girlfriends and asked if I liked them.
He tried his best to give me everything I wanted.
And I behaved like a spoiled child, asking for more and more, as if that could prove he cared.

When I was 16, I lost myself.
I entered relationships constantly.
Friends, dating, anyone who came close to me.
I gave them whatever they wanted.

Skip school for a fancy lunch? Okay.
Stop talking to everyone else but you? Okay.
Set my phone wallpaper to your photo and use your birthday as my unlock password? Okay.

That entire year, I was like a puppet, doing everything people asked of me.
Until they got tired and threw me away.

Toward the end of that year, something changed.
My deskmate and I were kept in the classroom after school and told to share a note, so I talked to her.
My so-called “best friend” saw it and began to give me the silent treatment.

I knew what it meant.
She wanted me to come to her, to beg, the way I always had.
But I was tired.

So I didn’t go.
I learned to ignore her, just as she had ignored me.
Instead, I became close friends with my deskmate, and we are still friends today.

Then I entered the next hell.

A friend from junior high school, who studied at another high school, introduced two boys to me.

There was Boy A.
We started seeing each other not long after exchanging contact information.
Everything felt natural.
I felt relaxed with him.
I was even able to tell him about my past experience of sexual assault without fear.

I truly thought we were going to work.

We kept seeing each other.
He would cook for me when his parents were not at home.
After his phone was confiscated, he hurriedly wrote down my number and asked his classmates to send messages and make calls for him, explaining that he hadn’t disappeared on purpose.
He even took photos of his scratch paper, which was covered with my name.

I thought we would continue like this.
Until one day, he posted a photo of a girl on social media and said she was his girlfriend.

I asked my friend, who told me they had already been close at school for about a month.
When I checked the girl’s social media, I realized he treated her just as well.
Skipping classes to accompany her for ID photos, cutting fruit for her after lunch, bringing it to school as dessert.

That was it.

I logged out of all my social media accounts and disappeared for the entire summer.

Not long after I came back, I met Boy B.
I don’t remember how we started talking, but he was genuinely kind and very shy.
He had never been in a relationship before.

We got together.
But honestly, I was selfish.
I was trying to use the relationship to heal myself.
And it didn’t work.

Still, I tried my best.
I learned from my friends how to “be in a relationship”.
Birthday gifts, handwritten cards, flowers.
Holding hands.
Kissing him, even when I wasn’t very comfortable with it.

We were together for three months, until someone else stepped in.

It was his friend.
At first, he would come along on our dates.
I thought it was because Boy B was afraid of messing things up.
Later, this friend confessed that he had feelings for me.

The timing could not have been worse.
Boy B and I were already on the edge of breaking up.
At the same time, my grandmother attempted suicide by cutting her throat in my room and fell into a coma.

He told me this in the hospital waiting room.
Boy B had gone to stay at his grandfather’s house for a while, and when he heard what happened, he asked this friend to come support and comfort me.

I didn’t respond.
But I made a terrible decision.
I held his hand.

After that, everything spiraled out of control.
When school started again, he approached Boy B and said he wanted to talk.
I don’t know what he told him.
But soon, my name began to circulate in our social circle, followed by all kinds of insults.

That night, I cut my arm many times.
Not deeply, but I was not fully conscious.
At 3:30 a.m., a friend knocked on my door, held my hand, and forced me to fall asleep with them.

I disappeared from social media again.

That person transferred to another school and later went abroad.
Before leaving, he came to see me, cut himself multiple times with a knife, and said he was truly, deeply sorry.
I grabbed the knife from him, knelt down, and begged him to let both of us go.

That was my eighteenth year.

When I was 19, social media began to explode.
For the first time, I was exposed to concepts like mental illness and depression.
I read the symptoms and realized I matched them almost perfectly.
What I had believed were personality flaws finally had a name.

I went to a public hospital and took the assessment.
That was where this story truly began.
For the first time, I felt like I could breathe.

I spent my college years in a haze.
Avoiding my stepmother and her children when I went home.
Endlessly hearing the same question:
“Don’t you have a home of your own?”

When I was 23, I changed my legal name.
I chose a name that means “a whispering star”.
I once read that “after death, people become stars in the sky.”
I wanted to believe there was a place for me.

Now, I am 26 years old.
I am learning to accept myself, to understand this illness, and to stop deliberately revisiting my past or avoiding everything that might trigger it.

I am doing okay now.
I have a kitten who curls up in the crook of my arm when I sleep or cry during my low periods.
I have friends who go out with me when I am in a high period and greet me during holidays.
They make me feel like I have a family of my own.

When I was 16, I never imagined I would live past 18.
But now, I am here.

I really resonate with the original intention of the Semicolon Project.
“My story didn’t end; it just paused.”

I tattooed a purple semicolon on the inside of my left wrist.
It became the reason I stopped hurting myself.

Thank you for staying.
This is my story.

Love,
Star
January 20, 2026