The Supermarket

Tesco shouldn’t be hard. It’s a supermarket. It’s fluorescent lighting and wonky trolleys and the same Adele song they’ve been playing since 2015. But for me it’s a battlefield.

The noise first. The beeping and the announcements and the children screaming and the trolleys clanking and the sheer, overwhelming volume of a building full of people doing something normal while I stand in the cereal aisle trying to remember what my children eat.

I know what they eat. I feed them every day. But standing here, under the lights, with the noise and the people and the impossible task of choosing between forty-seven types of cereal, my brain empties. Completely. Like someone pulled the plug.

This is what they don’t tell you about trauma. It doesn’t live in flashbacks and nightmares. It lives in Tesco. In the frozen aisle. In the self-checkout that asks if you’ve used your own bag while your hands are shaking and you can’t remember your PIN.

I make lists now. On my phone. Detailed lists. Not because I’m organised. Because without the list I will stand in the middle of this shop and forget why I’m here and what I need and whether bread comes before or after milk and the overwhelm will build and build until I’m in the car park breathing into my hands wondering how a forty-pound food shop became a trauma response.

He used to control the shopping. Obviously. He controlled everything. But the shopping specifically. What we ate. What we bought. What I was allowed to put in the trolley. The budget was his. The decisions were his. My job was to execute his list.

Now the list is mine and the decisions are mine and the budget is mine and freedom, it turns out, is terrifying when you’ve never had it. Because every choice is a test. And every test is an opportunity to get it wrong. And getting it wrong used to have consequences.

There are no consequences now. I can buy whatever cereal I want. I can buy the expensive butter. I can buy something just because I like it without justifying the expense to a man who spent freely on himself and rationed me.

I bought the expensive butter last week. And I ate it on toast at midnight. And nobody said a word.

That’s victory. In the supermarket. Under the lights. With Adele playing and a trolley that pulls to the left.

That’s what victory looks like now.