What has been your toolbox that they can start applying to keep them with us?

Fantastic question.

I tell people any sort of change that you need or any sort of tool, habit, routine that you need for a time of adversity, you need to build it before the adversity.

So for everybody, I would say everybody should have a fantastic toolbox.

in case so some of the things that have helped in my entire mental health journey i think the first thing for me was really unpacking why i was where i was and that meant that i needed to call out a few things, you know, in my upbringing.

It meant that I needed to disrupt my relationship with my parents a little bit and with my family system.

Not necessarily because I felt like, you know, you guys were evil, you did bad things to me.

Why is it that no one wants to talk about it? What have you seen or what stopped you from talking about it for so long?

Hauwa, speaking of limited knowledge, when you look back, what do you think people around you did not understand about what you were going through?

Partly because, first off, we did not grow up with such conversations about mental health in the way we know it today.

We didn't have the language.

We didn't have the understanding.

And so having someone go through something that just felt, no, that's not something I can particularly understand on a physical level just felt like, well, if I don't understand it and I don't have the wording for it, then perhaps it doesn't exist.

We also grew up, or our environment, our communities, and our countries are very hyper-religious as well.

And so there's a sense of, you know, there's the social, cultural, but also the religious angle to it as well, where it's like, "No, no, no, no, no, God will not, you know, do something like this to me," or, you know, evil spirits and, you know, possession and all those kinds of conversations.

Did you have any experience with the police or healthcare workers after you survived the attempt?