Background  

            Sometimes a single meeting can change how a person sees their whole life. When someone witnesses another person's transformation up close, they begin to believe transformation might be possible for them too. This is the story of an old friend I reconnected with. A story about hope, and about coming full circle.

            I am Sabina Thapa Gurung, a Peer Counsellor at FAITH. I wasn't always in this role. Years ago, I was on the other side of it; struggling, lost, and eventually spending eight months in a rehabilitation center myself. It wasn't an easy time in my life. But in that difficult time I first learned to see my own story differently not as something shameful to hide, but as something I could eventually use to help someone else.

            After I left the rehabilitation center, I completed a 15 days counselling training with FAITH. Slowly, the same organization that once helped me stand on my own became the place where I found my purpose. Today, I sit with women who are living through what I once lived through, and I try to carry what they're carrying, even if just for an hour.

Crisis

            One day, while running an orientation session at a rehabilitation center under FAITH's mental health program, I saw a familiar face. It was a woman I had not seen for almost four years. She was an old friend from my community, someone whose home I used to visit when our lives were very different than they do now.

            At first, she didn't want to be recognized. She kept her distance, tried to stay unseen, avoided my eyes. I understood immediately what that meant. She was afraid that if people here knew her past, they would judge her the way the world so often does. So I let her be. I didn't call attention to her, didn't approach her, didn't make her feel exposed.

            Then, on her own, she came to me.

            "Didn't we know each other?" she asked quietly. "I used to visit your house."

            Four years seemed to disappear in that one sentence. She asked me, almost begging, to keep what I knew about her private. I promised her that she was safe with me that nothing she told me, and nothing I remembered, would leave that room. In that moment, I understood something I still carry with me every day in this work, 'Sometimes the first step in helping someone isn't advice. It's making them feel safe enough to exist in the same room as you.'

Turning Point

            Later that day, during the orientation, our team showed a short film about mental health, followed by an open conversation about emotions, hidden pain, and the courage it takes to speak. Partway through, I made a decision. I shared my own story with the room including the part I don't often say out loud, that I too had once been exactly where they were sitting.

            I shared, "Sometimes, to gain something, you have to be willing to let something go."

            I watched my old friend as I spoke. She used to spend the whole session trying not to be seen. But for the first time, she was looking straight at me, listening to every word.

            We stayed in touch after that, through FAITH's regular follow-up visits. Eventually, she returned home. Then, one day, my phone rang. It was her.

            I said "You've turned out so well".

            She answered "Seeing you made me believe that I can recover too. I felt like I can move forward and can do something with my life."

Present

            I hadn't changed her. I want to be honest about that. I hadn't given her some piece of advice that fixed everything. She had simply looked at the shape of my life where I started, and where I ended up and recognized that the same door might be open for her too.

            Since that phone call, she has taken small, steady steps. She joined a support group and went back to work. She is slowly learning to feel happy with her family again and to bring what she has learned in recovery into her everyday life; not just in the counselling room, but in the middle of cooking, eating, and daily family routines. Not everything in her life has changed. But something has begun. And it began with one sentence she said to herself before she said it to anyone else "I can, too."

            A person's past is part of who they are but it is never the whole of who they can become. Sometimes, all it takes to see that is one safe space, one person who doesn't flinch at your history, and one living example of someone who has already walked the same road and made it through.

            I don't see my own past as a weakness anymore. I see it as the reason I know how to sit with someone else's pain without looking away. And every time I do this work, I remember: someone once sat with my pain too.