Relied on Yourself

If I could tell the girl in the quiet house one thing, it would be this: you will only ever really truly be able to rely on yourself.

That sounds bitter. It isn’t. It’s the most freeing thing I’ve ever understood.

I spent years waiting. For someone to see me. For someone to save me. For someone to show up and say you’re enough and mean it in a way that stuck. I waited for my parents to notice. For the musician to choose me. For the husband to change. For the system to catch me. For someone, anyone, to stand in front of me and say I’ve got you.

Nobody came.

Not because people are terrible. Some are. Most aren’t. Most are just busy with their own survival. Their own eggshells. Their own quiet houses. They don’t have the bandwidth for yours and it’s not their fault and it doesn’t make them villains. It just makes you alone.

And alone, it turns out, is workable. More than workable. It’s where you find out what you’re actually made of. When there’s no one to lean on, you discover you can stand. When there’s no one to ask, you discover you already know the answer. When there’s no safety net, you learn to build a floor.

I taught myself to code at nineteen. Built a business at twenty-three. Left a marriage at thirty-five. Survived the Jobcentre. Survived the smear campaign. Survived the flat tyres and the spiders and the bins at 2am and the constant, relentless, bone-deep exhaustion of doing every single thing alone.

Not because I’m special. Not because I’m strong. Because I had no other option and no other option is the mother of every invention I’ve ever made.

I’m nearly forty. I live in a house that answers to me. I run businesses that answer to me. I raise children who are happy and loud and nothing like the quiet children in the quiet house I grew up in.

And every single bit of it was built by a woman who stopped waiting for someone to save her and saved herself.

That’s not a tragedy. That’s the whole point.

You will only ever really truly be able to rely on yourself.

And yourself, it turns out, is enough.