Self

Leaving an 8-year relationship did not just mean walking away from a person. It meant slowly finding my way back to myself. Since the split, I have learned so much about who I really am, and in many ways, it has been both painful and beautiful. When you spend years being criticised, blamed, and made to question yourself, you start to lose sight of the parts of you that once came naturally. You become smaller without even realising it. But once the noise fades, the truth start

Lately, I’ve been going through reassessment, and it’s brought up a lot for me. For a long time, I was told I had BPD, and I accepted that because I thought the professionals knew best. I tried to make sense of myself through that diagnosis. I tried to carry it, understand it, and live with what came with it. But now there are real questions being asked about whether that diagnosis was ever right in the first place. What if I didn’t have BPD at all? What if I was reacting to

Hi, I’m Everleigh. I’ve sat and rewritten this more times than I can count, because when you’re someone who is always the strong one, always the organiser, always the one sorting everyone else out, it can feel strange trying to stop and explain who you actually are. The truth is, I’m a lot of things. I’m a care manager with years of experience behind me, and caring for people has never just been a job to me. It’s who I am. I’ve worked in health and social care for a long time

Music always finds you at the right time. Not just songs you like — songs that mean something. Songs that match where your head’s at, what you’ve been through, what you’re still trying to process. This isn’t just a playlist. It’s a timeline. No.1 – Bottoms Up This one isn’t about drinking. It’s about wanting your brain to just stop for five minutes. When life feels loud, when you’re overthinking everything, carrying everything, feeling everything… sometimes you just want a br

I swear online dating is one of the most humbling things a woman can put herself through. You go on there in a decent mood, maybe even feeling nice about yourself for once. You upload a few good pictures, tell yourself to keep an open mind, and think maybe, just maybe, there might be one normal man left in the world. There isn’t. What there is, though, is an endless supply of pretty boys, man whores, emotionally unavailable men, desperate weirdos, and those ones who act like

“Do you feel like a man when you push her around?” That lyric used to just be a song to me. Now it feels like my story. Domestic abuse doesn’t start with someone’s hands around your throat. It starts slowly. Control disguised as concern. Arguments that somehow always become your fault. Being told you’re too emotional, too dramatic, too much. And before you realise it, you’re walking on eggshells in your own home. I lived like that. Behind closed doors there were moments where

I’ve been sitting with a thought I don’t like admitting out loud. Maybe I’m the problem. Because when you line my life up like evidence, it looks bad. Not wanted by my mum. Sent into foster care at nine. Abused by someone who shared my blood. Passed between homes until sixteen. Then relationship after relationship with men who controlled me, hurt me, or slowly erased parts of me. At some point, it stops feeling like bad luck and starts feeling like a pattern. And when you’re

I’ve been feeling more like me  again… and I didn’t realise how much I’d missed her until she started showing up in little moments. Because when you’ve spent so long feeling drained, numb, overwhelmed — when you’ve been surviving more than living — you don’t always notice how far you’ve drifted from yourself. You just adapt. You function. You get through the day. You do what you have to do, and you tell yourself you’re fine because you don’t have time to be anything else. But