The 79p Notebook

I bought a lined notebook from Tesco. 79p. It saved my life.

Not dramatically. Not in the way you’d put on a film poster. It saved my life the way a rope saves someone who’s been treading water so long they’ve forgotten what standing feels like.

He was rewriting my memory. That’s what gaslighting is, when you strip the psychology away. Someone systematically replacing your version of events with theirs until you can’t trust your own recall. Until you start sentences with “I think” instead of “I know” because knowing has been taken from you.

I didn’t call it gaslighting then. I called it confusion. I called it maybe I am remembering wrong. I called it perhaps he’s right and I’m the one who’s losing it.

And then one night at 2am I wrote it down. What he said. What actually happened. The date. The time. The words. In blue biro on lined paper with a crease down the middle because I’d folded it into my dressing gown pocket.

The next time he told me I was misremembering, I went upstairs and I opened the notebook and I read my own words back to myself and I felt something I hadn’t felt in months.

Certainty.

Not confidence. Not strength. Just the bare, brutal certainty that I was not making it up. That the thing he said didn’t happen did happen. That the conversation he denied having did take place. That reality was where I left it, not where he’d moved it to.

I kept writing. Every night. Every incident. Every twist. Not for court. Not for evidence. For me. For proof that I existed. That my version of events was real. That the woman in this house was not crazy, no matter how many times the man downstairs implied she was.

That notebook is the reason I left. Not the courage. Not the strength people like to project onto you afterwards. Not some Hollywood moment of clarity.

A lined notebook. 79p. Tesco. Blue biro.

That’s what saved me. Because when someone is dismantling your reality, the most radical thing you can do is write it down.