“The higher I tried to make myself feel, the harder I seemed to crash. That became my cycle. Party. Drink. Drugs. Escape. Then the crash.”

“I have spent my whole life fighting to find my place. I have been knocked down again and again, yet every time I got back up, I became stronger.”

“For most of my life, I believed I was lazy, oversensitive, disorganised, emotional and simply not good enough. I spent more than forty years believing I was broken, without ever understanding why.”

“At first, I struggled to understand that what I was experiencing was domestic abuse. He had never physically hit me, but coercive and controlling behaviour had slowly been breaking me down.”

“Medical trauma was a part of my story too because there were so many times when I didn’t feel completely safe inside my own body and I think that’s something a lot of people don’t understand.”

“I became a stranger to myself. Things that once felt easy suddenly felt impossible. I questioned my reactions, my thoughts, even who I was.”