The Floor Below the Ditch

There is an ancient, hard-won boundary that sits at the foundation of human civilization.

It doesn’t negotiate.

It doesn’t bend for context.

It doesn’t care about your algorithm.

You do not destroy your own children.

If you are setting up a ring light, picking up your living infant, and captioning the video “Same, Lindsay” to signal solidarity with a woman who strangled three kids in a basement, you don’t need an online support group.

You need Child Protective Services knocking your front door off its hinges.

This is not maternal advocacy.

This is not raising postpartum awareness.

It is a hollow, performative rot that trades the murder of children for engagement metrics.

Our earliest myths were not bedtime stories; they were psychological warning markers driven deep into the dirt so we wouldn't wander back into savagery.

When Greek mythology needed an image for the absolute floor of monstrous evil, it gave us Kronos—a father so consumed by paranoia that he devoured his own newborn offspring whole.

When the foundational story of Abraham played out on Mount Moriah, the entire moral arc of humanity pivoted on a single command: put down the knife. The turning point of civilization was the permanent, uncompromising rejection of child slaughter.

It took millennia to build that floor.

And now suburban influencers dissolve it in thirty seconds for views.

The narrative being sold online is tidy and sanitized: a blameless, exhausted mother swept away by a sudden medical tragedy.

Reality is colder and far more deliberate.

It was calculating drive times to takeout restaurants to create an empty house.

It was pill shopping.

It was crushing Seroquel.

Don’t lecture me about the chemical ditch. I know what the bottom looks like.

I spent years snorting quetiapine nightly, chasing a chemical blackout until my nervous system turned to static. I know the exact stupor where your motor function disconnects so thoroughly from your brain that you sit there trying to light the filter end of a cigarette.

It took four brutal years of grinding through cognitive fog just to rebuild a baseline.

On top of that, I’ve lived through years of active, unyielding psychosis at a time. I know what it means when reality fractures, when paranoia takes root, and when the world inside your skull becomes hostile territory.

I am not perfect.

Not by a long shot.

But through every second of that nightmare, I never laid a hand on a child.

Severe mental illness is an agonizing, terrifying weight. But it does not come with an automatic mandate to butcher your own blood. Millions of parents navigate debilitating postpartum depression, chronic exhaustion, and horrifying intrusive thoughts every single day, and they never harm their children.

To look at filicide and say “it could happen to any of us” is not empathy.

It is an insult to everyone fighting through the fire to protect their families.

It is a lazy excuse masquerading as compassion.

It is the erasure of three dead kids to make room for adult narcissism.

Three children were strangled in their home.

There is no solidarity in that basement.

There is no sisterhood in homicide.

There is no “Same, Lindsay.”

If you look at that crime and see yourself, put down the phone.

Check into an inpatient clinic.

And feel the shame you’ve spent so much effort trying to outsource.