25 June 2006 Every year, on this date, I find myself waking, without fail, around 2 or 3am, thinking about Ryan. My body just knows. My mind drifts to that morning that changed all of our lives forever. What had he been doing in those final hours? Was he awake the whole night? Waiting? Or had he set an alarm, quietly deciding that today would be the day? Did he plan it, or was it a sudden, impulsive moment of pain too heavy to carry? Why then? Why at a time when things finally seemed to be looking up for him? When, for once, none of us saw it coming?…

My brother asked our mother for help a few months after I was admitted to Kenilworth Clinic. He claimed it was the first time he had tried heroin—on the very same day I was admitted. Now, he was caught in the grip of addiction. We naively believed that one round of rehab would fix everything. That he’d recover, we’d return to normal life, and the chaos would fade. But we were so terribly wrong.

When children grow up in environments where emotional safety is inconsistent or conditional, they learn to disconnect from their inner truth. Trauma doesn’t always come in the form of overt violence. Sometimes, it’s the slow, daily erosion of self-worth.

I’d climb into the car after another long day at Primary School, blinking back tears as I left one kind of hell, only to return to another. At school, the girls teased me relentlessly. I didn’t look like them, didn’t talk like them, and definitely didn’t like the same things they did. I didn’t care about dolls or crushes or clothes. I smelled like horses, not Impulse body spray.