This is an ABC podcast.

A quick warning, this episode touches on the topic of suicide.

Take care while listening.

I did have a good childhood, but it was, there were things such as a lot of anger in my household,

and sometimes that anger resulted in pain.

And when you're a child, you don't know how to cope with stuff like that.

You're not taught that, and you haven't learned all those coping mechanisms that adults can use.

Hannah Byford is a 28-year-old nurse from Los Angeles in the United States, and for two decades of her life, she kept a secret.

It was an escape. It was to protect myself and give me that outlet in a way that maintained my sanity and in a way that I could oftentimes feel love and I could feel acceptance

and I could be who I am without worrying about being hurt.

The place Hannah escaped to when things got too painful in the real world was an imagined

life inside her head, an elaborate daydream.

There's storylines, there's plots, there's characters,

and we can go to at any time,

so we can snap in and out of that daydream,

as easy as snapping your fingers, really.

As a child, Hannah would spend hours a day in these intricate

daydreams, building entire new world. We can create story arcs with characters, and we can use

characters that we have found maybe in movies or books or TV, or we can make up our own characters and our own plots

and our own twists and our own turns.

And essentially, it is just one form of a coping mechanism that we use to basically escape

from reality many of the times.

...