Anna Thygesen

Anna Thygesen lost both her parents to suicide, her father when she was 17 and her mother when she was 21. Yet when asked whether she has ever been close to that same darkness herself, she answers without hesitation: no. That refusal is the quiet engine of this entire conversation. She does not frame her life as survival or triumph over trauma. She frames it as a choice made in a single, unremarkable afternoon when she was a teenager sitting in a hallway, watching her mother spiral after her father's death, and deciding that she would not let the same thing happen to her.

Growing up stronger than the adults around her

Thygesen grew up on a farm outside Aarhus in what she describes as a bright and happy childhood. But she also grew up with parents she recognized early on as "extremely fragile." Her mother suffered from manic-depressive illness and was one of the first Danes to receive lithium treatment. Her father, a smallholder, was a deeply sensitive man who cried at television programs about hungry children in Africa. Thygesen remembers perceiving herself as mentally stronger than both of them when she was still a child. She could say things that made them scared — not because the things were dangerous, but because her parents' fear was about their own inability to let her go. "I knew it was more about them than about me," she says, without resentment.