The Journal

Pregnant and alone.

I want to take you back thirteen years because that's where this story actually starts, not with who I became, but how I got here.

I was pregnant with my third baby and I was in love.

Genuinely, deeply, completely in love. The kind you can't logic your way out of. The kind that sits in your chest and stays there, no matter what your head is screaming at you. The kind that makes you keep choosing someone even when everything around you is telling you to stop.

I loved him. I want to be clear about that from the beginning. This isn't a story about being naive. It isn't a cautionary tale about a woman who should have known better. It's a story about being human.

About wanting to feel what love felt like, even imperfectly, even messily, even without a guaranteed outcome.

Some people come into your life to hurt you. Some come because they're just as lost as you are, searching for the same thing, that feeling of being chosen, of mattering to someone. I don't say that to excuse anything. I say it because I think a lot of us have been there, and not enough of us are honest about it.

But I was also standing in the middle of something I couldn't keep pretending wasn't happening.

The environment around me was toxic.

The promises kept coming, and kept being broken. The betrayal I turned inward, over and over again, blaming myself for, because it was somehow easier than accepting what was actually real. I carried the weight of that the entire pregnancy. The guilt. The shame. The quiet grief of loving someone and still knowing, deep down, that staying was going to cost me everything.

And I could feel the labels before anyone even said them out loud.

The Bus

So, I packed up my babies, and I got on a bus.

Pregnant. With my children beside me. Heading to the one place, the one person, I knew would take me in without a single question.

My Nana.

My person. Through everything. Through every hardship, every mistake, every version of me that showed up broken and hoping she'd still recognise me. She always did.

At Her Table

I arrived, and I sat at her table.

And I want to be honest about what that felt like, because I think someone reading this needs to hear it said plainly.

I felt like a failure.

I sat there, at that table, in that warm, safe, familiar space, the same table I had sat at my whole life, and I looked around at everyone there, and I felt every single thing I thought I was supposed to feel. The shame. The embarrassment. The weight of how it all looked from the outside. Pregnant. Just left a relationship. Escaping domestic violence. Two babies already. Starting over with nothing but the bags I'd packed and whatever was left of my dignity.

I know how it looks. I know how it sounds.

And I want to say something to anyone who has ever sat at a table like that, in a safe place, finally out of danger, and still somehow felt like the guilty one:

You are not alone in that feeling.
Not even close.

We are human. And being human means sometimes we find ourselves in circumstances we never planned for, loving people we probably shouldn't have stayed with, making choices we can't always fully explain to the people watching from the outside.

There are words people use. Opinions people form. Looks people give without saying a single thing out loud. And I felt all of them, even sitting in safety, even finally out of it. I felt like a fool. I felt like I had chosen this. Like I had run away. Like I was the problem in the story everyone else was telling about me.

The Truth I've Had to Sit With

But here's the truth I've had to sit with honestly, even when it was uncomfortable:

The relationship I walked away from, regardless of the circumstances, regardless of what I was told or what I told myself, I did betray things. Not just the relationship. My own worth. My own dignity. The standards I had quietly let slip while I was trying to hold everything else together.

I wasn't in my right mind. I was vulnerable in a way that I don't think I fully understood until years later. I was surviving something while simultaneously creating more things to survive, and I didn't have the awareness yet to see what I was doing or why.

And I'll be honest, and I don't say this for sympathy, I say it because this journal is about raw honesty, and I think someone needs to hear this, too.

There were moments in that season where, if I hadn't had my babies, I don't know if I would have made it through.

They were the reason I kept going. Full stop. In the darkest, most isolating, most hopeless moments, I looked at them, and I kept going. They saved my life without ever knowing it.

That's not a small thing. That's everything.

On Telling This Story

I want to pause here and say something about telling this story, because it's something I think about.

When you have children who grow up, who get older, who start asking questions, you have to hold two things at once. Honesty and protection. Truth and awareness. You want them to know the real story of where they came from, who their mother was, and what she survived. But you also want to protect them from the weight of details they're not old enough to carry yet.

This story is about honesty. It always will be.

But it's also about choices, and understanding that choices have layers. That nobody's story is as simple as it looks from the outside, the same circumstances that appear weak from one angle can look like survival from another.

I've made many mistakes. I'm not here to romanticise any of them. I'm not here to say I was in love and that makes everything okay. It doesn't work like that. Life isn't linear. It isn't a clean narrative with a clear hero and a clear villain.

It's messy. It's complicated. It's full of choices made by imperfect people in impossible moments.

What I Know for Certain

But here's what I know for certain, all these years later:

The universe is always listening. Always watching. And everything that has happened in my life has happened for me, not to me.

I truly believe that.

Without the hardships, without the bus ride with my babies, without sitting at my Nana's table feeling like a failure, without the domestic violence and the grief and the rebuilding and the starting over, Seed & Sands wouldn't exist. The ability I have now to sit with someone else in their pain, to genuinely understand it, to hold space for it without flinching, that didn't come from nothing. It came from all of it.

Every lesson I once called a mistake. Every season I once called a rock bottom. Every moment I once thought was going to break me.

That's why I can help people. Not despite all of it, because of it.

And people will always have opinions. About your choices. About your past. About the version of your story they decided without ever asking you to tell it yourself. That will never fully stop, and I've had to make peace with that.

But what I've learned is this:

When you can stand in your own story, fully and honestly, without performing it, shrinking it, or dressing it up to make other people more comfortable, something shifts. You stop needing their version of you to be different. You stop waiting for their understanding before you allow yourself to move forward.

The raw honesty about your own life sets you free.

Not the polished version. Not the edited, acceptable, digestible version.

The one where you sat at your Nana's table feeling like a failure and kept going anyway. The one where you jumped on a bus with your babies and chose survival over comfort. The one where you made mistakes and loved people you shouldn't have stayed with and still managed to build something beautiful from all of it.

That version of you is the one worth leading with.
Because that version of you is real.

And real is the only thing that actually helps anyone.

Stay well my loves and I will see you in the next journal entry.