Every story has the beginning people see and the beginning that actually matters. Mine is thirteen years ago: pregnant with my third baby, and walking away from someone I never really got to have.
He was the one who helped pull me out of a toxic relationship. The one who listened. The one I eventually fell for, and the one I couldn't have. We talked about a life together, the kind of conversations that make you believe there's something waiting on the other side of the hurt.
I loved him mostly in thought, in the idea of what we could be. Then those conversations turned out to be a lie, and I was fooled.
This isn't a story about him, or about us. It's about the feeling of having to leave, and of choosing to.
Looking back, I was still in survival mode. Living on instinct. Reaching for anything that felt like safety and calling it love.
So I chose my babies. I chose to keep them away from the drama, drama I'll own I helped create. Honesty was all I ever had, and it wasn't enough. It was me against them, and it felt like the entire world was judging me for it.
I could feel the labels coming before anyone said them out loud.
One Bus Ticket
So one day I stopped waiting for it to get better. I packed the bags, gathered my babies and got on a bus.
Belly out, kids beside me, heading for the only place I knew the door would open with no questions asked.
Nana's.
She was my safe place my whole life. Whatever version of me turned up, broken, embarrassed, barely holding it together, she always knew exactly who I was.
Safe, and Still Ashamed
I sat down at her table, the same table I'd sat at since I was small.
And here's the part nobody tells you about getting out: being safe doesn't mean you feel okay.
I felt like I had failed at everything.
I looked around that warm, familiar kitchen and felt it all land at once. Pregnant. On my own again. Two little ones already. Nothing to my name but a few bags and whatever pride I had left.
I knew exactly how it looked.
If you've ever been there, finally out, finally safe, and still somehow feeling like you're the one on trial, I need you to hear this:
That feeling is far more common than you think.
You are not the only one.
Life hands us situations we never pictured. We love people we shouldn't stay with. We make choices that make perfect sense from the inside and none at all to the people watching.
And people do watch. They form opinions. They give looks that say plenty without a word. I felt every one of them, even there, even out of it. I felt stupid. I felt like I'd brought it on myself. Like I was the villain in a story everyone else was telling.
Owning My Part
Here's where I have to be honest with myself, even when it stings.
Whatever the circumstances, whatever I was told and whatever I told myself, I let go of things in that season I never should have. My worth. My dignity. The standards I quietly lowered while I tried to hold everything else up.
I wasn't in a good place. I was more vulnerable than I understood back then, surviving one mess while creating the next, with no idea yet why I kept doing it.
And I'll share this, not for sympathy, but because this journal only works if I'm real with you:
If it weren't for my babies, I honestly don't know that I would have made it through that season.
That's the plain truth. On the darkest, loneliest days, I looked at their faces and kept going. They carried me without ever knowing they were doing it.
That isn't a small thing. That's everything.
Telling It to My Kids
Writing this, I think about my children, who are growing up and starting to ask questions of their own.
When you tell your story as a mum, you're always balancing two things: the truth, and their shoulders. I want them to know where they came from and what their mother walked through. I also don't want to hand them weight they aren't ready to carry.
So this story is honest. It always will be.
But it's layered too, because every choice is. Nobody's story is as simple as it looks from the outside. What reads as weakness from one angle is pure survival from another.
I've got plenty of mistakes behind me and I'm not here to dress them up. Loving someone doesn't make it all okay. Life isn't a straight line with a clear hero and a clear villain.
It's messy. It's complicated. It's imperfect people making choices in impossible moments.
What It All Became
Thirteen years on, this is what I know.
The universe was listening the whole time. Everything that happened, happened for me, not to me.
I believe that with my whole chest.
Take away the bus ride. Take away Nana's table and the failure I felt sitting there. Take away the heartbreak, the judgement, the starting again from nothing. Without all of it, there is no Seed & Sands. The way I can sit beside someone in their hardest moment and not look away? That came from somewhere. It came from all of it.
Every so-called mistake. Every rock bottom. Every moment I was sure would finish me.
I don't help people in spite of my story. I help them because of it.
People will always have something to say about your choices, your past, and the version of you they decided on without ever asking. That part doesn't stop. I've made my peace with it.
What changes is you. When you can stand fully in your own story, without shrinking it, performing it or tidying it up to make someone else comfortable, you stop needing their approval before you move forward.
Being honest about your own life is what sets you free.
Not the filtered version. Not the one that goes down easy.
The one where you sat at your Nana's table feeling like a failure and got up anyway. The one where you took your babies and chose them over everything else. The one where you trusted the wrong person, made the mistakes, and still built something beautiful out of the pieces.
Lead with that version.
It's the real one.
And real is the only thing that has ever truly helped anyone.
Look after yourselves, my loves. See you in the next entry.
Love Medz x
