Woah.

I sat there on my sofa, staring blankly at the screen, not because I suddenly wanted to quit my life and run off into the sunset like she did (although that does sound quite appealing most days!) but because it made me realise I couldn’t answer a very simple question.

What brings me joy?

I sat there desperately trying to think, searching my brain for something, no matter how small, going through the list of typical midlife hobbies and things I’m meant to be into.

Reading? I enjoy it, but not in the way people talk about joy.

Gardening? Absolutely detest.

Hiking? That one almost made me cry.

You see, I used to love nothing more than going for long walks down the South West Coast Path, climbing steep cliff faces, wandering through ancient woodlands and ending up on some beach watching the waves dance. That was before it became less of a joy and more of a physical challenge.

There has to be something, surely? I asked myself, digging deeper.

Nope.

So I did what every adult does when they can’t answer a simple question, I asked Google AI. It asked me, If you want to start exploring, tell me:

If somebody handed you a completely free Saturday, with no responsibilities, no money worries and no illness, what would you spend the day doing?

BLANK.

I had absolutely no idea. None. I’m forty-four years old for gods sake this should be easy.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

Well, what do I know?

I know which supermarket has the cheapest cat litter and exactly how many hours of sleep I need to be able to make it through the next day without collapsing (it’s four). I know which bills can probably wait until next month, how much I have in my savings account to the penny and how to share a kitchen with a stranger I once thought I’d grow old with.

But what do I actually enjoy doing for fun…

Honestly?

I couldn’t answer and that freaked me out.

Six years ago I could have answered without thinking, back then I was the woman who went out for a quick walk and ended up doing eight miles simply because it was a beautiful day and I didn’t want to stop taking in the views.

I did cardio boxing after work because it made me feel like a total badass. I had loads of plans with friends…dinners, theatre trips, girl dates. I also had a body that generally did what I asked it to.

Then 2020 arrived.

Out of nowhere came severe head and neck pain, followed by a level of exhaustion I didn’t know existed. My world slowly but surely became smaller, less leaving the house, which naturally evolved to mean less friends.

Eventually, I reached the point where the only way to get through the afternoon was to lie down at lunchtime in one very particular position, surrounded by an embarrassingly precise arrangement of pillows.

Apparently employers aren’t wildly enthusiastic about someone who works from home (sometimes their bed), needs a nap every lunchtime and can’t promise what tomorrow’s body will decide to do.

So I lost my job too.

Around the same time, my husband and I started sleeping in separate bedrooms.

Mainly because he started snoring like a banshee and fell asleep in two seconds flat, whereas I take anywhere from one to three hours to drift off and sleep so lightly that a mosquito clearing its throat three streets away would probably wake me up. And when I was already that sick, sleep was no longer optional. I couldn’t afford to lose it. A bad night’s sleep could knock my health sideways for days, leaving me with even less energy and even less ability to function.

By 2022, the marriage was over, for a multitude of reasons (if you’re deadly curious you can find out all the sordid details in my other posts) and my husband moved out.

I was then left trying to manage a rundown 1850’s cottage while living in a body that didn’t seem interested in cooperating anymore. Every week there was the heavy wheelie bin to wrestle down the long steep untarmacked lane full of potholes and back up again.

Every day there were medications, endless appointments with any one of my ten consultants who had no idea what was wrong with me, whilst also trying to convince my cat that inhalers were, in fact, for her own good.

Then life added another twist.

Eighteen months after he left, my ex had to move back in due to financial reasons, not as my husband, but as my housemate.

If you’d predicted any of this six years ago, I’d have assumed you were confusing my life with someone else’s.

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And it’s only been over the last few days, since I watched that movie, that I’ve started to really look back and see something I couldn’t see while I was in the middle of it…that my brain had subtly and without consent, changed jobs.

It stopped asking what might make me happy and instead, became obsessed with keeping me safe.

And the frightening part is...I didn’t even notice it happening.

Every morning it woke up scanning for danger before my feet even touched the floor. Always listening. Always watching. Always waiting for the next thing to go wrong or come for me.

Like some prey animal standing at the edge of its burrow, scanning the horizon for the next predator. Then darting out just long enough to gather enough food to survive before disappearing back underground again.

It suddenly occurred to me that I’d been living like that for years.

And what was worse, was that surviving stopped being something I was doing and instead, it became who I was.

Holy shit.

I got it, at that moment I knew that’s why I couldn’t answer the question about joy.

There wasn’t anything wrong with me per se, I’d simply become so good at surviving that I’d forgotten I was supposed to be living.

The harsh reality of that much needed epiphany however is that not much in my life is actually likely to change anytime soon.

I’m still gonna be living with my ex until one of us can magically earn considerably more, we win the lottery or some other act of god.

My health hasn’t healed, it’s better but I still have challenges to overcome and fitness to rebuild from scratch.

The bills won’t disappear.

The predators are still out there.

But for now, something inside me has shifted a little. For the first time in years, I’ve stopped asking myself how I’m going to survive this and instead, I asked myself a different question..

What if I started looking for tiny pockets of joy while all of this is still happening?

Not after my life is magically sorted.

Now.

Even if some days that looks like just sitting in the garden with a cup of tea, toes in the grass, basking in the sunshine.

Going to the beach whenever I get a chance, even if it’s only for half an hour or dancing in the kitchen to my favourite 90’s playlist pretending I’m a teenager again.

Or laughing until I snort at something completely ridiculous on TV.

I honestly don’t know yet. I’m gonna have to take the time to find out, because I don’t want survival to become my personality forever.

I don’t want to wake up at sixty and realise I spent two decades waiting for my life to begin again. That I became so good at surviving that I forgot I was supposed to be living.

You know how it is. It starts with something like checking tomorrow’s weather to see if I can put the washing out on the line, then maybe scrolling Instagram manically looking for my next hair colour and 45 minutes later, I’m 7 tabs deep into something I have no business reading at this time of night and couldn’t even explain how I got there.

This particular night, I’d started on an article about sleep hygiene (ironic, I know), then taken a random detour through a list of the world’s most remote places, because who doesn’t want to live somewhere where no one bothers them, and somehow ended up on a page about rare Peruvian mountain plants.

As you do.

Or perhaps, as you do when you’re 44 and your ex-husband is asleep in the room next door snoring like a dejected monster truck and you’d rather read about literally anything else than lie alone in the dark with your intrusive thoughts about smothering him.

Anyway… that’s where I found her.

The Queen of the Andes.

And I haven’t been able to stop thinking about her since.

In case you haven’t personally gone down this very specific botanical rabbit hole…I’ll elaborate exactly why I became completely and hopelessly OBSESSED with this one particular plant instead of going to sleep.

So, as this article explained, high up in the mountains of Peru in a place so remote and so inhospitable that most living things took one look and said NOPE, there is a plant that has been doing something kind of extraordinary for longer than most of us have even been alive.

She grows at altitudes of up to 5,000 metres above sea level (FYI - that’s almost 12 Empire State Buildings stacked on top of each other tall!), where the air is thin and the temperature drops below freezing most nights. The soil, if you can even call it that, is little more than rock and grit and dust.

And yet. There she is.

This stubborn, doesn’t give a single fuck plant can spend 80, sometimes even 100 years growing before she produces a single flower.

I read it again.

80 years.

I don’t know why that number got under my skin the way it did. It’s just a plant. A very spiky, slightly ridiculously tall plant halfway across the world, but the more I found out, the more I found myself wondering things about her.

I wondered if she’d ever looked longingly down the mountain where life seemed greener and thought she’d grown in the wrong place. That maybe she’d have bloomed by now if she’d grown somewhere life was less bleak.

Did she ever compare herself to the effortlessly stunning lilies and fuchsias in the valley below her? Well, of course they're blooming, she thought. Look at their soil. Look at the climate they were given. Look how much easier they've got it.

I wondered whether at 40, she’d felt behind too, if every spring made her question herself just a little bit more.

Did she ever get tired of the waiting, of the constant struggle, of spending so much energy surviving she didn’t have any left to bloom?

Whether, after 80 years without a single flower, she ever thought...maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m just not the blooming type?

Probably not. She’s a plant after all. Plants don’t seem particularly interested in made-up deadlines, comparisons or who's ahead and who's behind. She just gets on with it.

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In fact, the reason she takes so long to flower is because unlike the other plants, she has to use all of her precious energy up making a potent anti-freeze every night just to make sure she survives it.

So let me get this straight…she’s a spiky, totally isolated plant, that grows in a harsh environment and spends her whole life so stuck in survival mode it takes her 80 years to finally bloom.

I have never related to a plant so hard.

And somewhere in the middle of all that ridiculous, completely disproportionate seeing-myself-in-a-plant nonsense, it occurred to me that had she grown with ease, flowering every spring just like all the other plants, people probably wouldn't travel from all around the world to see her. It is her beauty, her unfuckwithableness and her refusal to let everything that should have stunted her stop her, that makes her worth witnessing.

She dedicates decades focussing solely on her own growth, until the day she finally gathers enough energy to stop surviving…and blooms spectacularly. She shoots up a 20ft flower spike, crowned with tens of thousands of soft cream flowers, blossoming with everything she has. All those years spent silently becoming suddenly have somewhere to go.

Which makes me think, perhaps that’s what we’ve been getting wrong all along…that so many of us have mistaken our becoming for being behind?

That we are less like the common lily and more like The Queen of the Andes, just patiently waiting for our moment to bloom.

I think sometimes I dare people to leave me.

I let myself unravel. I stop brushing my hair, let dishes pile in the sink, let the shadows under my eyes spread like bruises. I sink into the kind of sadness that smells like stale sheets and half-eaten meals. And when they ask what’s wrong, I spit venom, sharp and biting, just to see if they’ll flinch.

Because if you can’t love me at my ugliest, when the weight of my sadness turns my body into lead and my words into knives, then I don’t have to believe you ever loved me at all.

I think I test people because I already know how it ends. I know that sooner or later they’ll see what I see when I look in the mirror.

The mess.
The madness.
The ruin.

And they’ll leave.

And maybe, deep down, I need them to.

I need them to prove me right. To run, so I don’t have to risk believing that love might be real.

Because if it is real, it means I’ll have to keep showing up for it. Keep earning it. And I don’t know how to do that without crumbling under the weight of my own unworthiness.

I tell myself that love is transactional, a trade-off of beauty and charm for attention and affection. But what happens when the charm fades? When the beauty gives way to the cracks beneath?

I know what happens.

They leave.

No one has ever passed the test. No one has ever seen the ugliness, the dark, broken, raging parts of me, and chosen to stay. Every time they go, it only cements what I’ve always known.

That love isn’t something I was built for. That it’s something I can lose the moment I stop being enough and I start being…me.

So I set fire to it long before it can leave me cold. I push it away before it can slip through my fingers.

And every time it goes, I feel both relief and devastation.

Relief that I was right.

Devastation that I was right.

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The women whose relationships are over, whose marriages ended months or even years ago, yet every morning they still wake up under the same roof as the person they’re no longer building a life with.

I am one of those women.

And until recently, I didn’t even know this strange limbo had an official name.

In-home separation.

I cannot tell you the ridiculous sense of relief I felt when I stumbled across those three little words, not because I was pleased to discover this strange existence had a label, but because it meant I wasn’t the only person living this bizarre half-life.

Apparently there are enough of us for someone to have named it.

Who knew?

As comforting as that felt, it also left me wondering why, if enough people experience this, almost nobody seems to talk about it.

We talk openly and at length about unhappy marriages and divorce. We even understand messy break-ups or temporary separations, yet we don’t seem to know what to do with the people caught somewhere in between.

We don't talk about what it's like to grieve a marriage while the other person is still making coffee downstairs. Or how quickly a home can stop feeling like one, every room carrying memories you're trying not to bump into.

We don't talk about how you can cook dinner together one evening, laugh at the television and then an hour later find yourselves standing in the kitchen reliving an argument that really started years ago because one familiar tone of voice touched a wound that never quite healed.

People imagine living together after a separation means you've somehow found a wonderfully mature way of ending a marriage. The reality is much messier than that. Living like this means constantly moving between peace and tension, never quite knowing which version of the day or person you're about to get.

Whenever I try to explain my situation to someone, I struggle to find the right words because how do you explain a life that's full of contradictions? You're no longer husband and wife, yet you're still sharing a home. You're trying to move on while constantly being reminded why you needed to. Some days it almost feels normal. Other days one conversation is enough to pull you straight back into the marriage you thought you'd already left.

Then I see it. The same glazed expression on their face. A slight tilt of the head, a little squint. A look that’s equal parts confusion and subtle judgement. You can almost see them mentally rifling through every relationship category they know, trying to work out which neat little box to put me in.

Eventually they settle on the same conclusion.

“So... why don’t you just leave?”

Said in such a way as to suggest that I’ve somehow overlooked the clear answer, as if choosing to stay under the same roof after your marriage ends is something anyone would willingly sign up for.

The advice usually follows straight after, something like…

“Life is short, sell the house already.”

“Just rent somewhere.”

“Move somewhere cheaper and smaller.”

“Start again in a new city, reinvent yourself!”

I know they mean well, I do. From the outside it looks like a problem with an obvious solution.

The trouble is, for many women (myself included) leaving stopped being an emotional decision a long time ago and instead became a mathematical one.

Housing costs.

Mortgages.

Low wages.

Caring responsibilities.

Children.

Pets.

Parents who need you nearby.

One impossible calculation stacked on top of another until you realise the problem isn't that you've missed the answer, it's that there isn't one.

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I live in the South West of England, where housing feels almost fictional at this point. Everyone talks about it, but finding somewhere affordable feels about as likely as spotting a unicorn.

Selling our home wouldn’t leave either of us with enough to buy somewhere else locally (not even a one bedroom flat).

Renting isn’t much better. Even earning above the average local wage means I don’t meet the affordability requirements on my own. Then there’s the competition. Families. Couples. House shares. All of them more appealing to a landlord than a single woman with a cat (how rude, they haven’t even met my cat!).

I also help care for my disabled sister and live close to my elderly mum. Walking away from my marriage is one thing I would happily do, walking away from them isn’t that simple.

Believe me, I’ve turned this puzzle over so many times I’ve worn the edges smooth. There isn’t a hidden escape hatch I’ve somehow overlooked, no spreadsheet with a sneaky calculation error, and no conversation that’s suddenly going to make the numbers work.

I’m stuck.

Realising this wasn’t just difficult, it was devastating. There were a lot of tears, more comfort eating than I’d care to admit, an unhealthy number of lottery tickets purchased and a brief period where entering online house raffles started to feel like a perfectly sensible financial plan.

For years I’d lived as though this was temporary. I kept telling myself, “Just get through this bit. Once the house sells, once you find somewhere else, once everything is sorted, then your real life can begin.”

It gave me something to hold on to because the alternative was far too depressing to consider.

Then one day I finally stopped lying to myself. I wasn’t just stuck for another few months, I was stuck for the foreseeable future.

The numbers weren’t about to change overnight, the housing crisis wasn’t going to disappear and my caring responsibilities weren’t going anywhere, so I had a choice.

I could spend another four years waiting for circumstances I had no control over to change, or I could accept the uncomfortable, undeniable truth that this might be my reality for far longer than I wanted.

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I'd already spent four years waiting to begin living, sharing a house with someone I no longer saw a future with. Someone who, on the hardest days, seemed to bring out only the worst version of me. I couldn't do much about still being physically stuck here, but I could decide whether I stayed emotionally stuck too.

I didn't want to wake up another four years from now and realise I'd spent it slowly losing myself.

So instead of asking myself, how do I get out? I started asking a different question.

If I can’t leave yet, how do I still live?

Looking back, that question changed far more in me than I realised at the time.

Slowly, instead of spending every day staring at the life I couldn’t have yet, I started paying attention to the life I already had.

My bedroom stopped being just the place where I slept and became the one space in the house that was utterly mine.

I filled it with a desk so I could write, a kettle so I didn’t have to leave every time I fancied a cup of tea, books piled beside the bed, snacks tucked away in drawers, soft lighting and all the little comforts that made it feel less like a prison and more like a sanctuary. Whenever the house feels heavy, I can close the door, turn the lock, exhale and remember that this small part of the world belongs solely to me.

Little by little, I’ve gone from pouring all my energy into trying to fix an unsolvable problem, to instead investing it back wholeheartedly into myself.

I’m learning who I am again. I’m becoming more self-reliant, more independent and, perhaps for the first time in a very long while, I’m getting to know the version of me that exists outside of my marriage.

My circumstances haven’t changed.

But I have.

My dream hasn't changed either. It's still a pink front door, a cottage with a bit of land for me and my cat, a space I can breathe deeply in and know every inch belongs to me. But the more I sit with myself, the clearer everything becomes…this part right here, it isn’t a waiting room where I'm killing time until my real life finally begins.

This is my real life. It’s the only one I will ever get.

I don’t want to look back and see I spent years waiting for a future to arrive instead of living the life already in front of me. I’m allowed to laugh, to create, and to make memories now. To become the woman I want to be today.

One day I will walk through the front door of a home that is entirely mine. I know it. And when that day comes, I hope I'm able to look back at this version of me with nothing but gratitude, knowing that I built a new life long before I had a place that felt like home again.

Until then, I've come to believe that courage isn't always found in the leaving. Sometimes it's found in refusing to let the waiting define you.

I have a feeling there are far more of us than we realise. Women rebuilding their lives inside circumstances they never chose, finding themselves long before they find a new home and choosing not to let the waiting hold them back.

If you are one of them, I would love to hear your story. Finding out this strange little corner of the world has a name made me feel a lot less alone. I hope me talking about it does the same for someone else.

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If this writing resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone navigating heartbreak, divorce or an unexpected fresh start. Sometimes the right words arriving at the right moment can change everything.

This poem was inspired by a post from at Birds Papaya whose words about body acceptance and rejecting impossible beauty standards sparked something in me. This isn't a response to her post, but the poem it gave me permission to write.

Ripe

They want us seedless,
smooth,
shrink-wrapped,
so nothing spills over.

Uniform rows of waxed apples,
identical in shape and shine,
stacked high on supermarket shelves,
easy to pick,
easier to digest.

But I want to be wild,
ripe and unrestrained,
a papaya split open
under the weight of its own plumpness.

I want skin that bears the seasons it’s weathered,
stretch marks like lightning cracks,
freckles like pollen dusted in sunlight.

Let me be speckled,
misshapen, bruised,
the kind of fruit
that bursts when you sink your teeth in,
sticky and decadent,
too messy for delicate hands
and paper napkins.

Let me grow wild
on tangled vines,
roots deep and defiant,
not trimmed,
not tamed,
not artificially altered to fit in.

Let me taste of earth
and summer storms,
of hands that sowed me
but never pruned me.

I want to be remembered,
not for how I looked,
but for how I tasted
when my juices spilled into your mouth and ran down your chin.

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Not because I wanted it to, but because years earlier, I had drawn a line. A deep one. The line you draw when someone has hurt you badly enough that something in your gut finally says…

Never again.

And I meant it. God, I meant it.

The trouble with boundaries is this: they are incredibly easy to set when you’re angry. When the betrayal is fresh, your hands are still shaking, and your whole body is screaming no more.

It’s much harder to honour them when they’re tested.

The first time he betrayed my trust around money, it was during one of those necessary, exhausting kitchen-table consultations where you try to map out a wedding you can actually afford. We were counting up the cost of champagne and canapés, staring down the reality that neither of our families had a chequebook to rescue us. If we were going to do this, we needed the bank to help us build our beginning.

That is when he said it. So casually, like shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

He confessed he was carrying five figures of debt from a life before me. A life I thought I knew inside out.

In a single, breathless second, the floor beneath my feet gave way.

We like to think we know the future we are stepping into. We believe that love is a mutual opening of all the hidden doors. But it turns out you can stand right next to a person, look them straight in the eye, and have no earthly idea who they actually are.

At first, it felt like being hit by a slow-moving truck. You see the bumper coming, you feel the dull shock of impact, but the true devastation takes a moment to ripple through your bones.

Because it wasn’t just about losing him. It was about accepting that everything I’d already poured into us might not lead where I’d believed it would.

Three years of my life, gone.

I was thirty-five. I’d spent years dating. Years hoping. Years watching my friends pair off and move forward while I sat on the sidelines, wondering what the hell was wrong with me.

Society was also sitting on my shoulder, impatiently checking its watch, reminding me that I wasn’t getting any younger.

And then, the frantic internal bargaining began, the desperate reasoning we do when we are terrified.

I looked straight down the barrel of the timeline I dreaded…

If I leave him now, it’ll take a year to heal. A year to find someone new. Another year to date. I’ll be pushing forty.

What if I want babies?

Sarah, I whispered to myself, you finally have the thing you so desperately wanted. A man. A wedding. A future. Are you really going to just throw it all away?

I took a breath, forced the fear deep into my lungs until it burned.

It’s just an omission, I lied to myself. It’s not a dealbreaker. You don’t throw away three whole years of love over money. Remember how brutal it was out there? No one wanted you. It’s this, or you die alone.

I didn’t even need his voice to minimise the wreckage. I was doing all the heavy lifting for him.

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So, I did what women do when their world turns upside down: I took control.

I rolled up my sleeves, dragged his bank statements into the light, and built spreadsheets that would make an accountant weep with joy. Wedding budgets. Repayment plans. Saving goals mapped out month by month with colour-coded tabs and more formulas than I care to admit.

I treated his deception like a maths problem, because maths has a solution. Maths can be fixed.

And of course, I stayed. I married him anyway, because that’s what you do when you love someone, isn’t it?

You rationalise. You pivot. You focus so hard on the horizon that you ignore the cliff right in front of you. You convince yourself the worst is behind you—that this beautiful, messy compromise is just the gritty prologue to your happily ever after.

This is the bit, you tell yourself, where we nearly didn’t make it. But we did.

For years, we lived by the gospel of my spreadsheets. We shrank our lives to fit the numbers. We said no to a real honeymoon, settling instead for a mini-moon (a week in a Somerset shepherd’s hut because it was nearby, practical, and mostly because it was all our bank account would allow). We said no to dinners out. We said no to impulse, to ease, to anything that existed outside the lines of the plan.

Delayed gratification became our love language.

And eventually, miraculously, it worked. The debt went down, the spreadsheets faded into the background, and we finally bought our dream cottage.

I stopped bracing for impact. I exhaled. I let myself believe that we had actually made it through.

Then he did it again.

This time it wasn’t debt from before we met. He’d opened a new credit card behind my back.

Thousands of pounds spent on airsoft equipment. Airsoft. Toy guns for grown men. Packages covertly diverted to his workplace so I’d never see them. Statements buried. A whole financial life I knew nothing about, running insidiously beside the one I thought we shared together.

We had starved ourselves of every small pleasure for years to dig out of the hole he created, and he’d gone and dug a brand new one. For a hobby.

I still remember the feeling. That strange mix of unbridled fury and disbelief, where your brain keeps desperately searching for an explanation that hurts less than the truth.

But there wasn’t one.

Again. Another secret. Another lie.

And eventually, betrayal stops feeling like a mistake someone made and starts feeling like information. Valuable information about who someone is when they think you’re not looking. About what they value and what they don’t.

I forgave him. Again.

God knows why. Hope, possibly. Denial, most probably.

That stupid, naive belief that people can change if they really want to. That the man you love is better than the thing he did. That this time will be different because you’ve both seen what’s at stake.

I built another financial plan. I created another budget. I did what I always did, what I was apparently put on this earth to do. I fixed it.

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And then I went further than I ever had before.

You see, I knew, even as I was forgiving him, that forgiveness alone wasn’t going to save us. You can forgive someone and still not trust them. You can love someone and still know they’re capable of lying to your face over dinner.

Trust doesn’t come back just because somebody says sorry—it’s a cheap, easy word unless there is action backing it up. It has to be rebuilt, brick by brick, and this time he was going to have to lay them himself.

So I did the scariest thing I could think of, something that will probably sound completely ridiculous to some people.

I gave him a chunk of our savings. A real amount. I transferred it straight into his account, so he could move it somewhere I couldn’t touch it, couldn’t see it, couldn’t monitor it.

This wasn’t a trap or even some calculated test to catch him out—it was a Hail Mary pass.

I was so tired, so bone-deep exhausted from holding up the weight of our marriage by myself. I couldn’t spend the next ten years checking his pockets, policing his bank statements, and wondering what he was hiding every time he looked at his phone. That isn’t a marriage. It’s a prison sentence, and I refused to be the guard.

So I handed him the money because it was the only way to know for sure. This would either save us or it would break us. Either he would do the work to prove he could be trusted, or he would fail, and I would finally have my answer. I would finally know exactly where I stood.

It was the most meaningful gesture of trust I could muster at that moment. Perhaps, the very last shred of trust I had left to give.

With one very large caveat.

I looked him dead in the eye and told him, clearly, without ambiguity, that if he ever betrayed my trust again, I would divorce him.

No more chances or spreadsheets. No more saving us from something he kept choosing to create.

“Am I clear?” I asked forcefully. I needed to know that he got the seriousness.

He knew that I was not someone who made veiled threats or minced my words. If I say it, I mean it.

“Yes,” he said, his eyes filled with relief and fear.

And the silly thing is, I believed him.

I believed him the way you believe someone when the alternative is too frightening to sit with. When not believing them means the life you’ve built, the home, the future… all of it was never as solid as you thought.

So I tucked that big boundary somewhere safe in the back of my mind, and I let life carry on.

The house. The cats. Work. Sunday roasts. Evenings on the sofa with our legs tangled together, watching something forgettable on the TV.

The boundary faded into the background of our life, not because it wasn’t important, but because I thought we’d survived it.

I thought that part of our story was over.

Then a couple of years later came the hot tub and my fortieth birthday, the sinking feeling I couldn’t shake. That sick, heavy knot in my stomach, telling me that something in my life wasn’t what I thought it was.

(If you haven’t read that essay yet, start there. It’s where all of this begins to unravel.)

Five days after my fortieth birthday was my father-in-law’s birthday.

We had lost him the year before, and my husband was still carrying that grief. You know, in the way men often do, where they don’t really talk about it but you can see it lurking behind their eyes. I understood that. Even with that feeling of dread lingering beneath the surface of our marriage, I knew I needed to show up for him in this moment.

So I did.

I walked into the lounge proudly carrying a long cardboard tube and handed it to him. Inside was a star chart and a certificate showing that I’d purchased a star in his father’s name. A way for him to look up at the sky whenever he needed to and know his dad was still watching over him.

I’d thought about it carefully; I’d wanted it to matter.

He looked at it.

“Thanks,” he said flatly.

And that was it.

No grateful smile, not even a kiss.

Just… thanks.

It wasn’t the reaction I’d hoped for, but I let it be. I told myself he was dealing with the unbearable weight of grief, that people process loss differently, that I shouldn’t read too much into a single word.

But somewhere underneath the excuses I was making for him, I felt it again. That gnawing ache nudging me. The feeling that I was pouring love into a space that could no longer hold it.

The next day, I mentioned the savings pot that I had entrusted him with years before and told him that I needed it transferred to the joint account because funds were running low.

Another day went by; he hadn’t done it. I mentioned it again casually—I really didn’t want to forget and go overdrawn, so it needed to be moved sooner rather than later.

I looked at him and he went quiet. Not normal quiet, like someone who hasn’t heard you. The kind of quiet that has weight to it, a defensive silence.

“I need to talk to you about that,” he said tentatively.

“But you’re gonna hate me...”

My blood went ice cold.

I think I actually stopped breathing. Not in the way people say when they’re exaggerating. I mean my lungs physically refused to move, like my body had decided that if it stayed perfectly still, the next sentence wouldn’t come.

But it did.

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He told me the savings were gone. All of them. He had taken them behind my back and invested them in cryptocurrency. Under his name only.

I still remember the specific way his mouth moved when he said it. How his eyes found the carpet, the window, the edge of the sofa. Anywhere that wasn’t me, because looking at me would have meant witnessing my face change as I understood exactly what he’d done. And he wasn’t brave enough for that.

I remember the ringing silence afterwards, those few seconds where the words just hung in the air between us, not yet real, not yet absorbed, just there, waiting for me to catch up.

He went on, explaining that it wasn’t the kind of crypto you could just sell and get your money back. Once it was in, it was in. The savings were gone. Just… all gone.

I think I made a sound. I don’t know what it was. A ragged, terrible thing between a laugh and a scream—the noise your body makes when it simply doesn’t know what to do.

I broke.

My hands were shaking so violently I could hear my rings clinking against each other.

Clink. Clink. Clink.

A tiny, frantic sound in the middle of the wreckage. My heart wasn’t in my chest anymore; it was a hammer slamming inside my skull, throbbing in my jaw, pulsing hot behind my eyes. The space around me distorted, tuning out, spinning. I couldn’t swallow. I couldn’t steady the ground under my feet.

I’m not sure whether rage or heartbreak was the larger wound at that moment. They fed each other, crashing back and forth, as I lashed between them so fast it gave me whiplash. One second I was screaming, the next I was entirely frozen—mouth open, nothing coming out, my whole body vibrating with a pain I didn’t have words for.

How is this happening? How is this my life?

I started pacing. Back and forth across the lounge, wearing a desperate line into the carpet, because standing still felt like drowning.

My fury built with every detail that came spilling out of his lying mouth. He told me he’d hoped he could earn enough to replace the savings before I ever found out.

So, he stole our savings, gambled them on cryptocurrency, and his defence was that he’d planned to get away with it. Like somehow that made it better. Like the intention to cover his tracks was supposed to comfort me.

Every single day for months, he had logged in and chosen the lie. He kissed me goodbye in the morning. He ate the dinner I made. He tangled his legs with mine on the sofa. And all the while, he was quietly burning down the house we lived in.

For the first time in my life I wanted to put my fist through a wall. I wanted to step out of my own skin because the reality inside it was too massive to survive.

“You knew the consequences,” I screamed, the air tearing in my throat. “You knew what I said. That I would divorce you if you did it again. And you did it anyway?”

“Yes,” he uttered quietly. His head dropped into his hands.

I stopped pacing.

Yes.

He didn't beg for mercy or plead insanity. He just admitted that he knew the price of his actions was losing me, our marriage, and he chose to pay it anyway.

In that single, ugly syllable, the final piece of the puzzle slotted into place.

He hadn’t just gambled our money; he had built a financial strategy entirely outside of our marriage. An account I couldn’t see. Funds I couldn’t touch. A safety net under his name, and his name only.

This wasn’t a reckless mistake or another financial betrayal. This was his exit plan.

He was already gone.

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I don't know the exact moment we lost each other.

Maybe it wasn't a moment at all.

Maybe it was a slow erosion.

One day

One choice

One silence at a time.

But I do know this…we stopped showing up for each other.

We stopped trying.

And by the time we noticed,

there was nothing left to fight for.

If this writing resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone navigating heartbreak, divorce or an unexpected fresh start. Sometimes the right words arriving at the right moment can change everything.

It was a warm July afternoon, the kind that feels deceptively perfect. The light was soft, the air still, and my husband and I were sitting in our hot tub sipping bottles of ice-cold strawberry and cream cider.

It was three days before my 40th birthday and for the first time in a long time, I let myself properly relax. My body had already been through so much by then: illness, exhaustion, a slow unravelling of my life I didn’t yet know how to stop. But for a brief moment, I let myself believe everything was blissful in my life.

My husband took another sip from his bottle, wiping the condensation from his mouth and said, so casually, that he hadn’t planned anything for my birthday.

No card, no present, no celebration. Nothing.

At first, my mind refused to accept it because it didn’t make sense to me. I searched for another explanation, one that felt easier to digest.

This has to be a trick. Surely this is the setup for something…a surprise, a party. That’s why no one’s available. That’s why everything feels strange.

I looked at him, waiting for the crack in his expression, waiting for him to smile.

But he didn’t.

I remember pausing for a second, studying his face desperately looking for reassurance, but what I saw wasn’t someone hiding a surprise. It was someone who already knew he’d hurt me and had no idea how to fix it.

There was something painfully uncomfortable in his eyes, and in that moment something inside me snapped.

My stomach dropped in that horrible hollow way that makes your whole body feel unsafe, my chest tightening as my breath caught somewhere halfway in my throat. Then the tears came, hot and immediate, the kind that sting as they fall because your body is trying to release something too big for words.

I remember thinking, this can’t be happening.

But underneath that thought was another one, something far more frightening:

This is exactly what’s happening.

Because suddenly it wasn’t about a birthday anymore. It was about the life I thought I’d been living.

Seven years earlier, I’d planned his 40th birthday with so much care because loving him came naturally to me. I filled those days with experiences he’d always wanted, tiny details that mattered to him, effort that never felt like effort because it came from genuine love. I didn’t expect anything back, but somewhere deep down, I think I believed that kind of care would at least be reflected back to me in some way.

Sitting there in the water, I realised it wasn’t.

And once that realisation landed, it spread and infected everything else.

The previous few years came rushing back all at once: my health deteriorating in ways I couldn’t control, losing my job, watching the version of myself I recognised slowly disappear. I’d already been grieving more than I admitted to myself, already trying to make sense of a life that no longer felt like mine.

And somehow, I’d pinned so much hope onto this one day.

This big birthday had quietly become a symbol, proof that life could still feel good again, that I could still feel seen, thought about, loved in a way that reminded me I hadn’t lost everything.

But sitting there, I knew I had.

I now saw that I didn’t have the marriage I thought I had. I didn’t have the friendships I believed I did and, perhaps most painfully of all, I didn’t have people showing up for me in the ways I desperately needed.

It felt like watching the very structure of my life disintegrate while I sat completely still inside it.

I don’t think I have ever felt so alone as I did in that exact moment. Not physically alone, but more emotionally bereft. Like something solid and reliable beneath me had given way, leaving me suspended alone and unsettled inside a life I didn’t want.

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Afterwards, he started explaining himself in a rush, throwing out reasons that sounded practical on the surface but empty underneath. Something about being out of practice, about not knowing what I liked anymore. But by then it almost didn’t matter because something inside me had already crossed a line.

I got out of the water slowly, everything suddenly felt disorientating, like the world had shifted slightly off kilter.

My whole body was shaking and numb.

And the sad truth is, I never got back in the hot tub again.

Not because of the water or the place itself, but because some part of me felt like it held the memory of that moment, of the person I’d been before I saw my life for what it truly was.

And I never wanted to feel that way again.

But even after that moment had passed, I hadn’t really grasped what had shifted inside me, inside our marriage. Not fully. What I did have was a sinking feeling I couldn’t shake, and a question that kept circling in the background of everything:

What else haven’t I been seeing?

It followed me for days, this sick, heavy feeling in my stomach that wouldn’t leave, like something big in my life was slightly out of place and my body knew it before my mind could catch up.

Even though nothing else had happened yet, at least nothing I could clearly explain to anyone, I knew that moment in the hot tub wasn’t isolated. It felt connected to something bigger, something that I hadn’t uncovered yet.

Over the next few days, I desperately tried to act normal. I dutifully let him go to Tesco and buy a generic card, a cake, a few decorations that looked like effort from a distance. I smiled, said thank you, played the role of someone having a nice birthday while actually feeling despondent and disconnected from the whole thing.

But underneath it all, that feeling never left…that quiet knowing, the sense that something had already started coming apart and I’d only just caught the first glimpse of it.

I didn’t have the full picture yet. I didn’t know what was coming. But part of me understood this much…

Moments like that rarely exist on their own, they usually point to something much deeper.

And a few days later, I found out exactly how deep and dark it went.

Part II - The Slow Burning of a Marriage here

If this writing resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone navigating heartbreak, divorce or an unexpected fresh start. Sometimes the right words arriving at the right moment can change everything.

“You’re not starting over from scratch, you’re starting over with experience”

And I understand why they say this. I really do. It sounds wise. Comforting, even.

But it doesn’t land. Not here.

Not when you’re standing in the middle of a life that just blew up.

Because I didn’t want to start over.

I had already chosen.
A person. A life. A direction.

That was the deal, wasn’t it?

You choose your person, and then you build something that holds. Not perfectly. Not effortlessly. But enough. Enough to rest inside of. And I did.

I rested there.

I let myself believe in it so fully that I stopped bracing for impact.

Which, it turns out… is exactly when it comes.

I had stretched my future out in front of me like a long, familiar road—twenty, thirty years of it—naively believing I knew where it led.

I didn’t know. Not really. None of us do.

Because in a moment I didn’t see coming, it was gone.

Gone in the space between a few words… and the silence that followed.

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And now I’m standing here, holding the pieces of something I thought was permanent, being told I should know exactly what to do with them—because I have experience.

But experience didn’t teach me how to grieve a life I didn’t get to finish living.

It didn’t show me how to rebuild myself, when my whole sense of self was wrapped so tightly around someone else’s I couldn’t tell where I end and they began.

It didn’t guide me through the insane disorientation of becoming someone new, when the version of me that existed before is no longer available to return to.

No. Experience didn’t help.

It just made me realise exactly what I’d lost.

Because yes, I am wiser now than in my twenties (thank god!). But I am also grieving in a way I’ve never known before. And grief doesn’t give a damn how experienced you are.

In fact, I have come to believe there’s no clean way through this.

No graceful arc. No version of this story where it makes sense while I’m still inside it.

It’s just ugly crying and loneliness.

It’s sitting on the floor longer than I want to admit, because standing up feels like too much.

It’s the shock of realising no one is coming to pull me out of it.

Not this time.

There’s rage, too.
The kind that has nowhere to go.
The kind that doesn’t resolve into anything useful or wise.

Just heat.
Just noise inside my body.

And the exhaustion—the kind sleep doesn’t fix.

The kind that comes from carrying something I never agreed to carry.

It breaks something in me.

Not cleanly.
Not all at once.

But slowly enough that I feel it happening.

And still—I keep going.

Not because I’m strong.
Not because I’ve found meaning in it.

But because something in me refuses to stop.

Even now. Even like this.

I brush my teeth.
I answer messages.
I stand up when my body wants to stay down.

I continue.

And it doesn’t feel like resilience. It feels like obligation, like being dragged forcefully forward by time.

And maybe that’s all it is, in the beginning.

Not healing.
Not growth.

Just the quiet, stubborn fact that I am still here in a life I don’t recognise
living days I didn’t choose.

And some days, in between the surviving, there are these moments (small, almost invisible ones) where I realise I made it through another hour.

Then another.

Not well.
Not with any dignity.

But I did.

And that’s it.

That’s all I have.

Not a lesson.
Not a reason.

Just this—

I’m still here.

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If this writing resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone navigating heartbreak, divorce or an unexpected fresh start. Sometimes the right words arriving at the right moment can change everything.

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