This piece discusses trauma, threats of violence, and suicidal thoughts. If you are struggling, consider contacting local emergency services or a mental health support line.
Sometimes I am left thinking: what is the point of all this?
Sometimes it feels as if everything that could go wrong in my life does. No matter how hard I try to be better, things still fall apart. I ask myself: what have I done to deserve this?
Maybe I did deserve suffering once. I haven’t hidden the fact that I used to be a person who lied, stole, and hurt others to get what I wanted. I made choices that deserved consequences.
But now? The last year of my life has been about proving I am not that person anymore. I have tried — painfully and honestly — to lay my past and present open. I’ve tried to earn back trust. I have failed at times. Occasionally a lie slips out, not the old selfish kind, but one meant to protect someone else. Sometimes I withhold the whole truth because it becomes distorted and harms others more than it harms me.
When I measure everything I’ve given up and built to become the person I am now, it cuts deeper when people still don’t trust me. I broke the trust once; I own that. But I have lost so much to arrive here. I have fought battles no one saw. So when people doubt me now, I wonder why I bothered at all.
Today I was in a situation where I genuinely feared for my life. Faced with danger, I told the person that they would have to kill me — I was not going to give in. I meant it.
When I came home, traumatised and physically hurt, I could not control my emotions. I needed safety, comfort, someone to hold me while my world steadied. Instead, I was asked if I was telling the truth.
That question — asked in a moment when I was raw and injured — broke me more than the incident had. For someone who has rebuilt their life from nothing, for someone who has spent months proving their honesty, to be suspected again felt like a betrayal. I wished for the old place I had left behind: the place where people didn’t believe me because I didn’t care anymore; where I could numb the pain with anything just to stop feeling.
To go through something terrifying and expect the presence of someone who will help you feel safer, only to realise they won’t — that is unexplainable. To be a victim, then be made to feel as if it were your fault, is gut-wrenching. All the progress I had made flooded away and, in two minutes, years of hard work felt undone. Those two minutes reminded me of the person I once was and whispered that people don’t change.
The worst blow wasn’t the threat itself — it was that the incident ceased to be about me. It became about how it affected everyone around me. My hurt became collateral, my fear a problem to fix for others, not something to hold with compassion.
I won’t pretend this is easy to write. For a moment I found myself thinking it might have been better if he had killed me. That thought terrified me, ashamed me, and yet it was honest. It’s one of the darkest places I visited after feeling so utterly failed by the very people who might have kept me safe.
I am sharing this because I want the truth to be heard: rebuilding doesn’t erase pain. It doesn’t immunise you from fear or from being retraumatised. It doesn’t prevent the moment a single question — asked without care — can strip away months of work.
If you are reading this and you have trusted someone who let you down when you needed them most, I see you. If you have fought to become better and sometimes wish you hadn’t bothered, you are not alone.
If you are having thoughts of harming yourself or feel unable to keep yourself safe, please reach out for support. In the UK you can call Samaritans on 116 123 or use your local NHS urgent mental health services. If you are in immediate danger, call 999 or go to A&E.
This is part of my recovery — messy, real, and still ongoing. I’m telling the truth because truth is how I’m trying to heal.
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