"I get knocked down, but I get up again"

Doubt hasn’t just crept in, it’s made a grand entrance and moved in. Comfortable in its usual surroundings of my self hatred.

Yes. I feel good here. Doubt says, smiling and stretching out, ready for a long visit.

Tonight, I’m sitting on the sofa in my pyjamas and I’m worried that the trauma I’ve been through in my life isn’t important enough to write a memoir about.

My pain…doesn’t feel big enough.

Anne befriended me, then stole my identity, my money and my self-belief. She took me for 30 grand while I was a vulnerable patient in hospital…but it doesn’t feel like it’s enough.

Gavin imprisoned me for 3 long years. But he never hit me. He didn’t have to. One word from him, and I’d tremble in fear. After a while, he stopped locking me in. I’d stare at that unlocked door for hours. All I had to do was push it open.

Freedom was one door push away.

Just one push.

But I didn’t leave him.

Invisible chains held me steadfast so that I was always right where he left me when Gavin came home from “work”.

He starved me. He overfed me. He physically used me in ways I still don’t have the words to describe… but he never hit me.

So it doesn’t feel big enough to warrant a chapter. My 3 years of longing to take one clean breath without Gavin first giving permission doesn’t feel big enough.

I have no bruises. No scars. No pictures of an almost-swollen-shut eye. No police reports. Nothing on record.

Everything Gavin did to me was on the inside. Deep down where no evidence is left.

So it starts to feel unreal to me.

If I don’t buy it, how is anyone else going to be convinced?

I remember the deep yearning I’ve had all my life to belong to my biological family.

Mom and Dad would be playing with Jay, fussing over him and exclaiming at his every sound and movement while I stood blurred in the background, whispering, “I exist too. Please see me. ” A dark girl on the edges of Jay’s story. I was a mere extra in the movie of Jay’s glorious life; easily swapped out for a cardboard tree.

A nothing.

Yet that doesn’t feel big enough to write about. Who is going to want to read about that?

I read these incredible stories all over medium about real suffering. Pain that is palpable. Trauma that weaves itself into the fibres of a well told story and leaves the reader breathless, touched, reached.

My stories aren’t like that.