The come down is… Sitting in Stratford, thinking, what is happening? My body aches from the come down from the alcohol. The come down is… I’m never drinking again. The nightmares are… frightening, from the past. I’m too scared to sleep. The hatred of oneself is… I’m not good enough. The palpitations are… constant and corrosive. The paranoia is… I can’t see anyone, nor do I want to. The panic attacks are… an intense tingling from my toes to my vagina, then to my chest, with fe

Watching Coronation Street this week felt less like entertainment and more like witnessing something painfully real unfold in front of me. The storyline around domestic abuse and coercive control hit hard. Not in a dramatic, over-the-top way, but in the quiet, insidious way these situations actually exist. It left me in tears—not because it shocked me, but because it recognised something so many people still struggle to fully understand. At one point, my daughter turned to me

Sometimes the words don't come. Some days, even the poems need a pause. This is one of those days. If I had a poem in me today it wouldn’t come forward it would linger backstage, half-dressed, forgetting its lines numbness sits low in the room, thick as unspoken words time drags its feet across the floorboards even my hands forget what they were reaching for a cold thing — not sharp, just dull enough to quiet the edges of everything a mind in a waiting room, no name being cal

Another poet once said to me, "Stop banging on about domestic abuse; you’ve got so much more than that." What did he mean? Did I write and talk about it too much? Isn't that meant to be my path? If the experiences I went through weren't for that, then what is my purpose? I questioned this far too much. It cast a shadow over my words and left blank pages screaming to be heard. Thankfully, it didn’t last. I spoke with others about his "instructions," and I never looked back. Th

International Women’s Day is often filled with celebration — stories of strength, achievement, and progress. And those stories. But there is another reality that sits quietly beneath many women’s lives. Silence. Not the peaceful kind, but the kind learned early. The kind that comes from knowing that speaking too loudly, asking for too much, or expressing anger might make things worse. So many women learn to smooth things over, to keep the peace, to hold their feelings inside.

When you have been a victim time after time from an early age, your body learns to live in survival mode. Fight or flight becomes the baseline. The nervous system never really settles. It is like an alarm that keeps ringing long after the danger has passed. Trauma does not just live in the mind. It lives in the body. It sits in muscles that never fully relax. It hides in the gut, the breath, the shoulders, the womb. It appears as sensations and symptoms that are almost imposs

Domestic abuse is not always loud. It isn’t always fists and shouting and doors slammed so hard the walls shake. Sometimes it’s quiet. So quiet that from the outside everything looks normal. People imagine they would recognise it. They imagine they would leave immediately. But abuse rarely begins in a way that is easy to name. It begins with small things. A comment about what you’re wearing. A question about where you’ve been. A joke that doesn’t feel like a joke. At first yo

I didn’t start writing poetry because I wanted to be a poet. I started writing because I needed to survive. Before poetry, my world felt small. Controlled. Heavy with fear. I was living in a constant state of tension — watching my words, watching my body, watching the air in the room. I didn’t have language for what was happening to me. I only knew I felt trapped. I was being hurt in ways I couldn’t explain out loud. So I began writing it down. At first, the poems weren’t pol