Thank You

Thank you. For reading. For staying. For finding yourself in these pages and not looking away.

I didn’t write this for applause. I wrote it because the silence was killing me. Because the truth was rotting in my chest and the only way to stop the rot was to let it out. Page by page. Story by story. Midnight by midnight.

But you showed up. You read it. You sent messages at 2am that said I thought it was just me. You shared it with friends whose stories you recognised in mine. You sat in your own kitchens and your own cars and your own showers and you read words that could have been yours and you felt less alone.

That’s all I wanted. Not fame. Not money. Not a platform. Just the knowledge that somewhere, in a house I’ll never visit, a woman read something I wrote and exhaled.

Because this. All of this. The quiet house and the eggshells and the car around the corner and the bedroom and the Jobcentre and the shower and the 3am and the grey rock and the Thermomix at midnight. All of it. It’s not just mine.

It’s yours.

It’s the woman on the bus who’s reading this on her phone and hasn’t looked up for three stops. It’s the woman in bed whose partner is asleep and who’s scrolling in the dark because these stories feel safer than the house she’s in. It’s the woman who left. The woman who stayed. The woman who’s thinking about leaving. The woman who doesn’t know she needs to yet.

It’s all of you.

And if I could say one thing to every single one of you it would be this.

You are not making it up. Your version of events is real. The thing he says didn’t happen did happen. The thing he says is your fault is not your fault. The thing you feel in your body when he walks in the room is information and you should trust it.

Trust it.

And if you can. When you’re ready. Not before. Not because anyone tells you to. When you’re ready.

Write it down.