by Michelle Funk Palacios as told on the Story Partners Podcast
The bullying was relentless.
All I wanted was one friend.
One friend who would stand next to me, stand up for me, speak up for me.
It was just such a lonely feeling. Is anybody going to help me? And it just didn’t happen.
Strange From The Beginning
I was born in Ohio, raised in Chicago, and I live in Florida now. I like to think that the reason my name is Heather Michelle Funk Palacios—one that I’ve yet to find another of—is because that’s my life. It is very unique, very eclectic, and very strange. It started from the very beginning.
My mom and dad were hippies. In the movement they were a part of, they did not believe in medicine or going to hospitals. I was born on September 25, 1973, in my parents’ bedroom—a large, almost ten-pound baby. Nothing but the angels was helping my mom. They were not believers at the beginning of their hippie life, but they got swept up into the Jesus movement and became ‘Jesus hippies.’ There was this beautiful collision of pot and Bible study happening in our home.
When I was four years old, we lived on Green Road in Haskins, Ohio. I remember one night my dad came in to pray with my brother, Jason, and me. He sat on the edge of my bed and asked me if I wanted to have a relationship with Jesus. I said, ‘Heck yeah! Who wouldn’t want that?’ My dad prayed the prayer of salvation with me at four years old. That was the beginning of my relationship with God. It would go through many highs and lows, but I definitely know I accepted Him into my heart then.
Zero Nostalgia
We grew up poor, for lack of a better word. We were sometimes on food stamps and government welfare. We moved around a lot because my dad was a college dropout and had to find blue-collar work wherever he could. My mom stayed home to raise my brothers and me. As the oldest of four in a home with no money, there was a lot of tension, stress, and tempers.
My childhood sucked. I don’t look back on it with any nostalgia. I started getting bullied pretty early. It’s easier to pick on the new kid, especially one who is poor and a little odd. In second grade, I wore a dress to a new school to impress the other kids. I sat at my desk, and they were all laughing because they could see up my dress. It was completely mortifying. I remember running to a bathroom stall and crying. I expressed that in letters to my grandparents; that was a blessing because it gave me an outlet to not keep it all inside.
My grandparents fostered the concept of journaling. I started when I was six. If you look at all my journals to date, there has been an ongoing sense that I could get out of this world by my own hand. I started noticing things were ‘wrong’ with me when I was eight. I knew I was different, odd, and peculiar—those were the words kids taunted me with. I did not like myself. Low self-esteem, loneliness, and a lack of self-worth made it tough. At home, necessity won over my emotional needs; it was easy to be overlooked. I was thankful for my grandparents in Chicago, who always championed me. They believed in me when home and school didn’t.
“Why We Hate Heather Funk”
At eight years old, I developed a lung disease that remains undiagnosed to this day. They say it might be a genetic mutation of cystic fibrosis. I started a life of being in and out of the hospital.
I was at a new school again. I walked into the classroom and all the kids were laughing. I couldn’t find my desk. I discovered they had shoved it into the corner, facing away from everyone else. On top of the desk was a piece of paper that said, ‘Why we hate Heather Funk.’ All the kids had signed it with reasons: She smells, she’s poor, she has a weird last name, she doesn’t dress cool.
That was the first time I really wanted to die. This was 1981. There were no organizations for mental health, especially for an eight-year-old. It was lonely. I was in the hospital by myself, desperately hoping I would die. I thought, ‘Please God, let this lung disease allow me to leave.’ I was eight years old, hooked up to IVs and breathing machines with no one to fight for me.
The bullying was relentless. I’m 51, and I still recall the vivid details of that social and emotional torture. I went home one day with a migraine due to the stress. I decided to write my grandparents a letter. Today, we would call it a suicide letter. I wrote, ‘Dear Angel, I’m coming to an end. My whole life just broke.’ My grandparents were alarmed and called my parents. A deacon from a local church, Mike Lyon, came over to talk and pray with me. He listened, but when he left, he took the comfort with him. Life resumed as I knew it. All I wanted was one friend to stand up for me, but it didn’t happen.
My Ruined Plan
From ages eight to 14, it was business as usual: being bullied, grades fluctuating, and being in and out of hospitals for pneumonia. At 14, we moved to Illinois. We had to give away my kitten, who was the only one that understood me. I had just gotten out of the hospital, we were poor, and I had to start over again.
That was it for me. We got to the new house, and while my family was gone, I picked my weapon of choice. I wrote a suicide letter and put it on the counter. I was getting ready to take my life when there was a knock on the door. It was the Orkin bug man. This guy had to come in and spray for roaches. My suicide letter and weapon were right there, and he was just whistling while he sprayed. By the time he finished, my family had come home. My plan was ruined. I still have that five-page letter on a yellow legal pad.
Nobody knew. I’ve reconnected with people from that time, and they say they had no idea I was living in that kind of hell. Shortly after that attempt, I discovered alcohol. I stole it, binged it, and hid it in hairspray bottles in my locker. Alcohol was a great escape. I also realized I could get attention from guys. I was so desperate. I had accepted Jesus at four, but it was an elementary faith. I would say, ‘I know You’re real, but You’re not helping me.’
The Psychopath & The Entrepreneur
At my new school, I saw a kid with my brother in a headlock. I turned into a complete psychopath. I ran across the gymnasium, pulled him off my brother, and went ‘Rambo’ on him. I knew what it was like to not have anyone come for you. I got suspended, but I had no regrets. Don’t touch my brothers.
High school was full of fights and being left out. I was so desperate to numb my existence that I became an ‘entrepreneur.’ I would ask the popular kids what alcohol they wanted for the weekend, steal it, and charge them for it. That lasted until I got caught by a grocery store manager. Thankfully, he didn’t press charges. I easily became addicted to alcohol. I would drink, starve myself, and binge. I was done with God and done with people.
Once, I got drunk and tried to jump into traffic. Kids at school encouraged me to do it. In a twisted way, I thought I’d finally have people like me, not realizing that if I were dead, I wouldn’t be around for the attention. When you’re young, you just want the pain to stop. Death seems like the only way. I started doing things that were illegal and immoral. My parents eventually buckled down and sent me to a Christian therapist, but they also insulated me so I couldn’t go anywhere. Now I couldn’t drink, couldn’t escape home, and couldn’t have friends. I wanted to die so badly it was palpable. I clocked where the gun, the knives, the pills, and the rope were in our house at all times.
The Prayer of “Unsalvation“
At 16, I said, ‘God, I’ve given You plenty of time to save me from this. You never showed up.’ I went into my bathroom and prayed a ‘prayer of unsalvation.’ I asked the Lord to leave my life and my heart. But I didn’t get less of Jesus, even though I wanted nothing to do with Him.
My high school graduation was lame. There wasn’t one person from high school at my party. I ended up going to a small private Baptist university because the soccer players were hot. God knew that was the only way to get me there. I had to pay for it myself, crawling my way to a degree. I dated about half the soccer team—sometimes two at once. The soccer coach eventually asked me to stop.
While I was trashing the ‘Puritan’ reputation of that campus, God was getting closer to me through chapel and Bible classes. I was testing Him and challenging Him. Even though I was ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ by myself on that campus, He didn’t reduce His grace. A business professor once asked me for four words to describe myself. I told him, ‘I can’t. I’m not a person on the inside. I’m a shell.’ That moment buried itself in me like treasure. I started to build a bridge back to God, asking Him to give me four words for myself one day.
Raul
After another failed suicide attempt with pills during college, I realized I needed to start over. I moved to South Florida with everything in a U-Haul to work as a bookkeeper for a church. I started cultivating friends for the first time. I met the singles pastor, Raul Palacios. He had this thing called integrity. It was very attractive. We started dating, and he proposed.
On February 6, 1999, I walked down the aisle to marry him. It was bittersweet because I wasn’t sober and I already regretted it. I knew I had no business marrying a man with integrity. For the next year, I lived a duplicitous life. I would get drunk before the Bible studies he taught. I was miserable.
On July 30, 2000, I decided I couldn’t divorce him because it would disgrace him. I made a calculated plan to take my life. I drove to a parking lot, drank a lot of alcohol, and started the process in my car. I called Raul because I didn’t want him to think it was his fault. He identified my location and sped over. He tried to stop me while calling 911. Police and ambulances surrounded the car. I had become unusually strong and violent, like a rabid animal. They had to tranquilize me and strap me to a gurney.
When I woke up in the hospital, Raul was in the corner with his face in his hands. I started cracking jokes, saying, ‘What a loser, I can’t even kill myself right.’ No one laughed. An agent came in and told me that because I was a threat to myself and society, they were going to ‘Baker Act’ me. I was required to go to a psychiatric ward for 72 hours. They put me in a van. I was missing a shoe, covered in blood, vomit, and urine.
The Psych Ward
They took me to a psych ward and wheeled me inside in a wheelchair. There wasn’t a room available yet, so they threw a sheet over me, shoved me up against a wall, and left me there. Finally, a room became available—an isolated room, lest I harm anyone the way I had tried to harm the first responders.
They put me in that room by myself, made me strip down, took all my belongings, and gave me a hospital gown. Then they asked Raul to leave. They locked the door and put a security guard outside. Because of my rabid, belligerent, violent intent to kill myself, the only thing in that room was a bed with no bedding. There were no murals on the wall, no artwork, no TV, and no knick-knacks, nothing that could be used to harm yourself.
And there I lay. I vividly remember how absolutely pissed off I was at God again. I wanted to die, but He let me live. Now I was going to have to live as a failed, suicide-attempting pastor’s wife. I just let Him have it. I let out a barrage of profanities and anger, spewing so much hostility toward Him.
My Deal With God
Where do you go from there? Show me the club, the association, or the members-only jackets for failed, suicidal, Baptist pastors’ wives. I was so angry. But once that anger was out, it wasn’t in me anymore. I became desperate and lost, just like eight-year-old Heather again, isolated in a locked-up psych room.
I started to talk to God. I realized that when God is all you have left, you really do have everything you need. I didn’t have anything or anyone in that room, but I was still here. I can only credit God for being in that room with me.
At some point in the middle of the night, I made a deal with God. I don’t know if you can actually make deals with God, but I think He gives concessions to crazy people. I said, ‘Yo, okay, we’re wrestling like You and Jacob.’ I was wrestling with my emotions, my profanity, my desperation, and my crying. Finally, I said, ‘All right, here’s the deal. Lord, if You can get me out of this hellhole, I promise to dedicate the rest of my life to helping people not end up here.’
For whatever reason, instead of the mandatory 72 hours, the state-appointed psychologist discharged me after 48 hours. I was allowed to make a phone call to my husband, and he came and got me.
That was just the beginning. The nightmare wasn’t over; the nightmare had just begun. But I had made that deal with God that night, and I wanted to honor it. I understood that meant I was going to have to do some very hard work before I could begin to pursue helping others.
Mental Earthquakes
When you go crazy at that level of intensity, it is physiologically like an earthquake. You have the initial quake, but afterward, there are subsequent tremors—aftershocks. That is exactly what happens to your brain. Following my psychotic suicide attempt, unexpected aftershocks would happen without warning. Wherever I was, I would suddenly start perspiring, panicking, trembling, and screeching. I needed to be subdued.
I had schizophrenic-type tendencies where I was hearing and seeing things that were imaginary but felt blazingly real to me. I had a heightened level of paranoia. My mother and cousin flew down to help manage my discharge from the psych ward because I was so fragile.
The next 52 weeks included intense psychotherapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, and EMDR—psychological techniques used to put the ‘scarecrow’ back together again. I became delusional, convinced that Raul was unfaithful or abusive. None of it was true, but my mind was so jolted that it was like putting a pile of straw back together one piece at a time. My brain was easy prey for paranoia.
Raul’s Vow
A few weeks after leaving the psych ward, I told Raul, ‘I want a divorce. This is never going to work.’ He looked at me and said, ‘I will never divorce you. I can’t stop you from divorcing me, but I will never leave.’
I moved to a different bedroom and eventually went back to my family in Chicago. But my parents said, ‘We don’t agree with this; you need to go back to your husband.’ With my tail between my legs, I flew back to Florida. It is amazing how powerful our minds are when left to their own devices. Raul was so long-suffering. He took my hatred and my accusations—paranoia coming out of me like bullets from a gun—and he stayed. He endured.
I just kept a visual of the promise I made to God. My therapist, Dr. Wells, gave me assignments between sessions. They were holy distractions. I couldn’t work because of the paranoia, and I didn’t have kids yet, so I was home alone with my thoughts. I was still well aware of how I could kill myself in every room of the house.
One assignment was to write down every sin I had ever committed in my life. I was defiant; I thought she was crazy. But I was resolute about my deal with God. He got me out of the psych ward, and I was going to own my end.
I spent a week purging decades of ‘graffiti’ and ‘trash’ from the castle where the King lives. It was cleansing. The next session, I handed the notebook to Dr. Wells. She didn’t read it; she put it in a paper shredder. I left that office feeling incredible because what was defiling me was now shredded paper.
Next, I went through every room in my house and purged things that tethered me to the life I hated—pictures of exes, club clothes, reminders of the enemy. I was renovating two castles: the house I lived in and the castle the Lord lived in within me.
During those 52 weeks, the medication was a ‘porcupine dance.’ People complain about side effects like weight gain or lethargy. I tell them, ‘Yeah, but you’re also not dead.’ Those pills kept me alive. Raul could have abandoned me—even a well-intentioned pastor advised him to—but he chose to stay. Through him, I learned to trust God. I finally found a friend closer than any other: Jesus was becoming my best friend.
Forced Isolation in 2020
After 52 weeks, Dr. Wells released me from her care. But for me, suicide remains a constant temptation. When things go awry, my brain only knows one way out.
During the 2020 COVID shutdown, forced isolation was like dancing with the devil. One spring day, while my husband and boys were fishing, the silence became my enemy. I started thinking, ‘You’re an embarrassment to your husband and sons. They’d be better off with a normal mom.’ I went into the garage, turned on the car, and started crying. I prayed, ‘Lord, Your word says those who call on Your name will be saved. Save me.’
My mind was made up to die, but God’s Spirit rose up in my gut. It wasn’t a vision; it was a strong internal voice saying, ‘You are going to die a hypocrite. You tell everyone else to call for help, and you aren’t doing it.’ I turned off the car, went inside, and called a suicide hotline for pastors. Later, my family came home, the dogs had to go out, and my son wanted a sandwich. God works in miracles, but He also works in the mundane. I went back to therapy, adjusted my meds, and put the scarecrow back together again.
Life Boxes
Out of that dark time, I birthed a nonprofit from my dining room. People were reaching out to me daily, desperate and suicidal due to the isolation of the pandemic. My friend Julie and I started sending ‘Life Boxes’—curated kits filled with everything I’ve ever needed to stay alive. From 2020 to 2025, we shipped 20,000 boxes to every state and 16 countries. Even Governor DeSantis acknowledged us.
But while I was helping the world stay alive, I was struggling myself. Then, in October 2023, I got a phone call that changed everything. My youngest brother, Chris, had fought addiction and suicide for years. We had a sibling pact: neither of us would take our lives. I had spent ten years helping him—finding him in canals, in jail, on life support. I wouldn’t let him burn his bridge with me.
The phone rang. It was his chaplain. He said, ‘Chris took his life.’ I dropped the phone. I shrieked. I drove to the hospital, and a nurse who knew me ushered me back. I held his hand as his skin went from warm to cold. On his wrist was a ‘Life Box’ band that said: Never Give Up. It felt like I saved the world but couldn’t save him. It still hurts. It messes with my head—he got to go, so why can’t I? But I have to remind myself: Chris is dead, and I am alive.
“I Am Breathing, I Am Not Quitting“
I had just enough life left to honor my promise to God. I used Chris’s funeral to speak life into his community. I retired the nonprofit recently because I realized you can’t gain the world and lose your own soul. The work was chipping away at me, and I needed to be a good steward of my own life.
Years ago, I couldn’t find four words to describe myself. Today, my four words are: I am weird, I am compassionate, I am breathing, and I am not quitting.
When I look at the Bible, I see Moses, Elijah, and Job wanting to give up. I see Paul begging God to remove his ‘thorn.’ I understand begging God to give me any weakness other than suicide. He hasn’t taken the thorn yet, but my two sons, DJ and Andy, have said they are proud of a mom who struggles to live but fights so hard not to die.
I don’t have a line of people wanting to be my best friend. I’m a mess. But Jesus is my ‘bestest’ friend. He’s stuck with me. My life verse is Psalm 118:17: ‘I will live and not die, and I will tell what the Lord has done.’ I can’t wait to meet Him—on His watch, not mine.
