Damned in Ink: a memoir

This isn’t a memoir in the classic “story of my life” sense. Rather, it’s a story of immense healing through trauma, mostly centred around one year of major upheaval, over 2024 to 2025.​

This isn’t trauma porn, nor is it all doom and gloom. Rather, it’s an insight into what someone with multiple mental illnesses goes through, from the battles of diagnosis, to the identity we all seek to find one day and grasp as it ever shifts through our hold.​ This isn’t a complete story of my life. Rather, it is a snippet of a crucial point in my life; a turning point which for all intents and purposes I feel changed me in the most earth-shattering manner and spat me out the other side as someone with deeper insight into myself than I could ever have imagined.​

This was written in 2025, as I went through a deep and personal journey of re-entering the private hospital system after previous trauma in the same system. I had to first find the courage to seek that help again, and then battle for admission around a system working against me due to medical practitioner trauma. A marred record from admissions in 2024, which you will see explored in this book, left me scrambling to be taken in by another treating psychiatrist, but I eventually did, and in doing so, I was open and honest about everything.

This is a story of survival of the illest, survival of the weak, survival of the damned, the determined, and the damaged. It may be a story better said through the artistry of those who have put the ink in my skin. But I will tell it, from this hospital bed in Brisbane’s northside, from where I am finally understanding myself and my complex trauma, my comforts and my failings.​

It is the story of Arlandria; my story.