Still Here

After everything. The quiet house. The abuse. The musician. The marriage. The bedroom. The Jobcentre. The shower. The 3am. After all of it. I’m still here.

Not fixed. Not finished. Not the after photo. Not the inspirational quote. Not the woman on the podcast talking about her journey with a serene smile and a book deal and the comfortable distance of someone who has processed it all into a narrative that other people find palatable.

I’m the woman at the kitchen table at 1am with a cold cup of tea and a laptop and two sleeping children and a dog on her feet and a heart that’s been broken so many times it’s mostly scar tissue but it still beats and it still feels and it still, against all evidence and expectation, hopes.

I’m still here.

That shouldn’t be remarkable. But it is. Because there were times it nearly wasn’t. Times the bedroom ceiling was the whole world and the whole world wasn’t worth the effort. Times the flatness was so total that being alive felt like a admin task I couldn’t be bothered to complete.

But I completed it. Every day. Not with courage. Not with strength. With stubbornness and children and a 79p notebook and a Thermomix and a cockapoo and the absolute, bone-deep refusal to let the people who broke me have the last word.

The last word is mine.

This one. And every one that follows it. Written at midnight. Published anonymously. Read by women who find themselves in these pages and think that’s me, that’s my kitchen, that’s my shower, that’s my school gate.

It is. It’s all of ours.

I wrote it down because silence was killing me.

I’m still writing.

I’m still here.

And if you’re reading this at 2am with your own cold tea and your own scars and your own version of the quiet house. You’re still here too.

That’s not nothing.

That’s everything.