Chapter 5
For me, home was never a place of warmth. It was never where I felt safe. From the very first moments I can remember, it carried a quiet, persistent tension like a storm that was always about to break.
It was in the sharpness of words thrown in anger, in the silence that followed when someone should have been listening. It was in the way my small mistakes were amplified, the way my successes were measured against others, never celebrated for themselves.
I remember walking through the hallways as a child, hearing laughter from other rooms, and feeling like an intruder in my own life. Everyone else seemed to belong, as if they had been given permission to exist fully, to take up space without apology.
I… I learned early that space was not mine to claim. My thoughts, my fears, my feelings, they were secondary, invisible, sometimes even inconvenient.