"Back to Self" is a deeply personal interview series that spotlights Black public figures opening up about mental health, recovery, and resilience. Through candid conversations, the series explores how mental health illness changes lives, what helps people find their way back to center, and what it takes to live with mental struggles and still reclaim oneself.

Danielle Belton looks like someone who has it all figured out. And in many ways, she does now. 

The veteran journalist and former editor-in-chief of The Root and HuffPost moves through the world with warmth, wit, and effortless confidence. What most people don't see is the decade she spent in and out of hospitals, calling suicide prevention hotlines while drinking boxed wine, barely holding on.

"I lost pretty much a decade of my life to severe mental illness," she said plainly, as if she's made peace with that sentence…because she has, That peace didn't come easily. It came through a diagnosis, medication, therapy, a blog that became a lifeline, and two promises she made to herself that she has kept every day since.

In 2006, Belton was diagnosed with bipolar type 2 disorder, anxiety, and PTSD. She also lives with agoraphobia and a collection of other phobias — heights, escalators going down (she has vertigo), and a sensitivity to sensory experiences that trace all the way back to her childhood. "I've had anxiety since I was in elementary school," she said. "I used to be afraid of camera flashes and loud noises. I've always had some psychological issues."

Her old-school Black parents did what old-school Black parents do: they pushed through it, prayed over it, and expected her to do the same. There was no language for what she was experiencing, no permission to fall apart.

But bipolar type 2, she explained, is not what most people picture when they hear the word "bipolar." It isn't the dramatic highs of mania. It's something quieter and, in many ways, more dangerous. "Bipolar type 2 is more defined by depression than mania," she explained. "The mania is not a true mania. It's a hypomania — slightly less severe — but the depression is like depths of sadness. Woe is the world. You're suicidal. It's not great."

The symptoms she'd managed since childhood became unmanageable in her twenties, especially when her brief and deeply painful marriage unraveled. When the divorce came, so did something she had never experienced before.

"I went into a deep depression and had my first bout with suicidal ideation," she shared. Belton was 23-years-old. The thoughts started as something else — frustration with her ex-husband, a desperate wish to escape the humiliation she felt. But they shifted. "The switch became, ‘If you want to get out of this, you should just kill yourself — because then it'll all end, and you won't have to live with the humiliation of being a divorcee.’" She paused. "It was really hard to turn it back off. Once that got flipped on, I was already miserable."

What followed was a decade that, by her own account, she barely survived. She was living in Bakersfield, California, isolated, one of the only Black people at her newspaper job, far from her family in St. Louis. She had no coping skills — just shopping, eating, and drinking her problems away. "I tried it all, really," she said, nodding to a Solange Knowles lyric that says exactly that. "I couldn't get it to go away."

There were hospitalizations, an almost-overdose, a morning when Belton fell asleep in her editor's face mid-conversation because she hadn't slept during a manic episode. There were calls to the suicide prevention hotline while drunk on Target boxed wine and Klonopin. There was her mother, back in St. Louis, waking up at the crack of dawn just to call her daughter in California and beg her to get out of bed and take a shower.

"By the time I got to my diagnosis in 2006, I was just in a place of complete defeat," she said. "I was so sad and miserable. I ended up having to move back home into my parents' basement. And I wanted to die."

So, she started her blog, The Black Snob, and “wrote her way out.” (Shoutout to “Hamilton.) Belton started the blog in 2007 as a pop culture and politics blog, sharp and funny and deeply her. It kept her tethered to herself when everything else was pulling her under. When Barack Obama won the Iowa caucuses in 2008, she wrote about it — and the post exploded. NPR called, The AP quoted her, and a path she thought she'd lost forever started to reappear.

"I never stopped writing. I never stopped caring about writing," she said. The blog was the thread she held onto until she was strong enough to climb back up.

By 2009, she was admitted to Saint Mary's Mental Hospital in St. Louis for her fourth hospitalization. Her psychiatrist suggested electroconvulsive therapy. She refused, as the idea terrified her. 

Instead, she got something unexpected: an invitation. Because of her blog, she had been invited to speak at a Harvard  conference. She and her mother were nervous, but her psychiatrist gave her the push she needed, and the reframe that would ignite her.

"I think your problem is you thought your job was making you sick, so you stopped doing your job," the doctor told her. "But doing nothing is also making you equally sick. You need to find a way to pursue your dreams with balance."

She went to the conference."It's like a light switch came on," she said. "That was my old self again."

By 2010, she had reached a place of stability. She made herself a promise: if she got there, she would live publicly with her illness. "I didn't know anybody that wasn't sick," Belton said of the people she encountered with bipolar disorder during her worst years. "Everyone I met was borderline homeless. They had substance abuse problems. Their worlds were all falling apart. I didn't see anyone living with the illness." She wanted to be that person for someone else. "If I just met one person that was functional with this illness — it gave me so much hope."

Belton learned the hard way that stability is not a permanent destination and that she had to “tend” to it daily. 

There were two more deep depressions after 2009. In 2014, her close friend died of colon cancer. At nearly the same time, her mother was diagnosed with dementia. The one-two punch sent her into a spiral so severe that when The Root offered her the editor-in-chief position — her dream job — she almost turned it down. A friend talked her off the ledge and Belton took the job.

Then came the pandemic. Belton, who before COVID-19 was out five nights a week — parties, happy hours, galas, dinners — suddenly couldn't leave her apartment. Her agoraphobia runs counter-intuitive: she said she needed to leave the house at least every three days, or it becomes harder and harder to go. "I was terrified to go out." But this time, she had something she didn't have in her twenties. "The difference between those two last rough times and the first rough time was that I knew I could get through it," Belton said. "I knew I had the tools."

Long before she developed those tools, Belton made two promises to herself. The first was to live publicly with her illness once she reached stability. The second was harder. "No matter how bad it gets, I am not going to hurt myself," she said. "Even if the suicidal ideation comes back, I'm just never gonna do it."

She kept herself here by finding an anchor bigger than her own pain. During her worst years, she couldn't love herself, so she held on for the people she loved. She had once covered a parental bereavement group as a reporter and interviewed parents who had lost children to suicide. "They all said the same thing, when you're a parent and your kid dies, your future dies. And you never get over it."

That stuck. "I hated myself, but I loved my mom and dad, and I did not do that to them."

Her advice now, to anyone in the dark: "Find something bigger than you that's going to keep you anchored to this world until you find that love for yourself again. It could be your family. It could be a friend. It could be your partner. It could be your dog. It could be a cause. Whatever it is — hold tight to that, because that'll get you through it."

Today, Belton is in love…with life, with her boyfriend ("he's so supportive and so kind and understanding"), and with herself in a way that once felt impossible.

"I can't say enough things that I love about myself. I love how I look. I love that I can cook. I love my brain sometimes, but I love it more than I hate it,” she shared.

Belton said was single for 20 years after her first marriage. She needed that time to heal, to build, to figure out who she was outside of illness and survival. She met her current partner through a mutual friend. Belton said the pandemic forced her to stop “half-assing” her love life and treat dating with the same strategic energy she applied to her career.

Coming back to herself, she said, is "going back into the past and giving the little girl that I was a big hug. That b**** needed a hug so bad. I can't tell you it's all going to be fine. I wouldn't have believed it back then anyway. I was in such a dark place. What I needed was support and love. Someone to pour love into me."

"If I could find stability — and I was a hot mess, in and out of the hospital for years — you can too,” Belton said.