Standard clause

My mother told a family member she was certain I would kill myself. She didn't call me. She didn't text. She reached for a story about a notary that wasn't even true.

Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice

Virginia Giuffre's posthumous memoir isn't about the men who abused her. It's about how victims are made - and how they fight back.

The verdict overturned

My father handed me an envelope labelled "shit report cards." Inside were years of evidence about who I had been. But old stories don't always fit the people we've become: especially when the story was never accurate to begin with

Good at Google

I was at a friend’s birthday party when the third bottle of wine just opened. Everyone was warm and loud and funny, the way people get when the evening stops being polite and starts being itself. Topics came and went: someone's holiday, someone's renovation, a

Knowing better

Two people were paid to look after me and could not manage it. Two others chose to and did. And the woman who actually got me back on my feet was not there at all, and does not know it to this day.

Names on paper

I got four diagnoses in 2015/2016. Three of them no longer exist. This is what they meant, what’s changed, and why I never took medication.

Supply Lines

The word narcissism has flattened. Social media has turned it into a label people throw at difficult (ex)partners, overbearing colleagues and at anyone whose selfishness becomes inconvenient. Used like this, it means very little. Used clinically it describes a specific architecture of the self. One that has consequences for

The day I got a name for it

Four diagnoses on paper. Nine months of waiting. Six months of assessment. And then: the crushing relief of finally being seen.