Authors Note:
I almost didn’t share this.
It feels unfinished. Messy. A little too close to the surface.
These are entries written across a few weeks. Captured as they happened, without much editing or distance.
This space was never meant to be filled with polished thoughts or neat conclusions.
It’s meant to hold moments like this – while I’m still in them.
05/03/26
My heart has changed. My soul has changed.
Words I will scream at the top of my lungs every damn time. From my chest because my god, are they true.
I am a different person to who I was a week ago, two weeks ago, a whole year ago. Wow. I am someone becoming a woman, the woman I was always meant to be. Fuck. I AM PROUD OF ME.
I am powerful. I am strong. I have so much resilience. I survived and didn’t drown in it all – I am amazing.
Okay – enough talking about me like that. What have I been noticing recently?
Yesterday I watched a stranger smile secretly, privately at a baby and the baby’s mother. I couldn’t help but smile at the smile. This man was suited in workout clothes – shorts, hoodie, backwards cap… Honestly? If we’re going off stereotypes, he isn’t someone you would immediately go ‘ah yes, they smile at babies’.
Ah, gosh. He’s back in the coffee shop today as I have just begun writing about him. Now I’m grinning like a fool. Jesus Christ. I will try to write this with a straight face but I am too expressive and do not have a poker face at all unless I am walking and I am on a mission.
Anyway, I noticed this man smiling, I watched him watching this baby and mother as the mother talked about her baby to a stranger in the queue and I was intrigued. Not in the sense of I want to know this man but… Why did my first impression of him immediately make me assume he isn’t someone who would smile at babies?
That probably isn’t my question and I am just making stuff up for the sake of writing so we’ll see where this goes. I do feel like I am writing just because, but I also just want to see what I can spew out, see what I can notice just by letting the knots in my head unravel – even if new knots form along the way.
Back to the man; he had no idea I was watching him, no idea I was observing him and I was hooked. I watched him wait for his coffee, walking up and down near the counter, dancing slightly on his feet without being obvious about it, I watched him watch this mother and newborn and I couldn’t help but think whoever has that man is lucky whether he’s an uncle or a father himself, whoever’s family he is a part of – they’re lucky.
And there it is. The big thing. It is not the fact that whoever has him is lucky. It’s the fact I observed him happy, present, content, I observed him observing.
I have been drowning, barely surviving this season of life yet yesterday I was able to be present enough to notice again, to notice my thoughts and to notice my curious mind wandering when I haven’t been able to hear anything else recently. It felt good to notice again, to see again but it was a reminder that it’s okay if I lose myself for a bit, I am always here waiting.
I can’t kill this curious mind, she will always live on. And I am forever grateful I get to remain curious and my brain wants to remain expansive in this closed off world. I am proud of the journey I have lived, I am proud of the chapters I have already written and survived. Maybe now, my future chapters are no longer about survival but about living.
I’ve just done the thing I said I was going to stop doing… Over intellectualising my emotions. Agh.
13/03/26
God. I am sad today. Not just today. All week. I have felt a heaviness sit on my chest all week that just won’t release. I can’t seem to cry and it’s driving me crazy because I’ve done everything I can to bring the tears up and they just won’t come up. They’re blocked.
What are they blocked by? Fear? Survival? Coping? Exhaustion?
I need the damn dam to break. Just one crack.
I keep hiding in music and quick dopamine fixes but the reality is I just feel heavy and numb but sad and exhausted all at once. I can’t even pinpoint what it is that’s causing me to feel this way so I can resolve it. I know I should just feel my emotions but it’s really hard to feel something when it just feels like a pressure on my chest. A literal knot and I’m unable to find the end to start unravelling it.
If I’m honest with myself then I know the only way out of this is just to keep putting one foot in front of the other but that sounds like literal hell.
I suddenly don’t see the point in anything.
I can feel myself getting dragged under.
The hand of despair reaches up and pulls me under.
It ignores my pleas, it ignores any hope I had pulsing through me.
Black shadows move through me, infecting my blood stream.
Clouding any sense of hope or happiness I had left.
Despair has taken over and I’m not sure my blood will ever run red again.
16/03/26
I went for a walk yesterday to meet my mother for coffee. I set off, the sun was shining, wind blowing a breeze. The coffee was good. The conversation was good. But whilst we were sitting drinking coffee the weather took a turn for the worse – rain poured, wind picked up so my walk home wasn’t very fun. I lie. I love walking in the rain – I’m often that person who is walking with their head held high, not shielding from the wet or the wind whilst everyone ducks their head.
This wind, this rain felt like it was washing something away, freeing something I had been holding. I watched the droplets hit the water of the canal, felt my lip tremble and I realised I was going to cry. I have no idea what it released but it helped release a pressure I didn’t know I was holding.
Now I’m sitting here – after describing the moment (badly) – trying to figure out what it was that was released. I probably don’t need to know, my nervous system clearly needed it for whatever reason. But I can’t help wanting to know – I think it’s natural to want to know. But I don’t know. I’m clearly not ready to know the answer.
I know I was grateful for the rain coming down as hard as it did – it hid my tears when I walked past strangers. Not that I tried hiding when I walked past them, I still gave them that British smile and nod ‘hiya’, or maybe it’s a Yorkshire thing.
Anyway, I’ve been listening to Orange Juice by Noah Kahan a lot recently. I shout-sing the part “my heart has changed and my soul has changed” – because it has. It really has. The song is about sobriety, changing life and yourself when revisiting a past place, a hometown and I get it. Not so much the sobriety part – not that I drink really – but just changing. I am stepping into a new chapter and I feel like I am leaving people behind and thank fuck for that.
I hate everything I write lately too. I’ve been writing longer form essays for my book and I reached flow state with one of them so everything since then has just been so shit and doesn’t sound good at all. It’s frustrating. Everything I write now feels rubbish compared, which is annoying because all I’m doing is writing to process my emotions but instead when I read it back I’m cringing – yay.
18/03/26
I have been struggling to write, once again (yay), and I want to say I don’t know why. But the truth is, it’s because I’m very much in a survival phase of my life right now.
But it’s a weird sort of survival. I am still noticing small things, small moments that make my heart happy or send a sense of calm over me.
20/03/26
Unable to write – can barely write. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I hit flow state once and everything I have written since has just been pure shite.
I also have noticed I am not really feeling anything at the moment, I’m just surviving and going through the motions of life. Which is fine. We all have those moments, those periods of life and I’m still making a conscious effort to notice small things that bring me joy, then capturing a picture of that moment. It’s still weird though – I’m capturing these soft moments and not really processing what I am seeing. I’m not really feeling anything even if the moment does feel… ‘aesthetically’ nice? I think that’s how I would describe it.
I haven’t been sleeping recently either – no more than 4/5 hours a night, which is lovely (sarcasm intended). It’s incredibly frustrating because I am tired. I am so tired but as soon as I take myself to bed and try to sleep, I can’t. Insomnia is very real. Disgustingly so.
I am just writing for the sake of writing to prove that I can write but they’re more like pointless journal entries no one needs to read. I hope I can write another essay style entry soon because I am starting to believe it was just a fluke.
Sat in a coffee shop whilst I write this. Just observing humans. There are two people clearly running a job interview with a man who doesn’t seem nervous at all. Middle-aged couples scattered around, drinking coffees. A couple of solo patrons (like moi) working on their laptops or in their notebooks. It’s busy for first thing on a Friday and I kind of love how there are so many different people here.
22/03/26
I wrote a letter to him (that he will not see), then wrote the words below afterwards because the letter was very raw and full of emotions I had not let out.
—
The part that hurts the most is I let myself live like that. I feel fucking stupid for letting that happen to me. How could I be so goddamn stupid?
I let myself believe that the love, or lack of, was good enough for me.
Maybe I wasn’t good enough for him.
Was I not good enough? Do I not deserve love? Is everything I do not worthy of receiving love? Am I not worthy enough to be truthful to? Am I not worthy of anything?
I don’t think I am worthy. Because if I was, why would I have accepted that? Maybe deep down I know that I will never be worthy of love.
It feels like I’m not worthy of anything more.
I’m embarrassed to admit that nothing changed between us when I ended the relationship. That the relationship was broken for so long that nothing fucking changed.
I hate this. I hate myself. I swallowed my feelings, my thoughts, my everything. I stopped doing anything for myself. I did it all for him and for the kids. I lost myself completely and I let it happen. I hate myself for that.
—
If my friend told me these exact words, I would tell her that she is not unworthy of being loved, that she isn’t the problem. I would tell her that she stayed because she wanted to protect her peace, the kids’ peace, and protect the idea of the future she’d imagined. I would tell her she was strong for going through all of that but she is not to blame.
25/03/26
There is nothing more frustrating than saying you can’t write, when you can write, but you just can’t write anything good or worth anyone reading.
I just want to write something that is worth people reading. But right now, nothing feels like it is. Everything is just me ranting or getting angry at nothing. I am very angry at the moment. I am also riddled with anxiety. Absolutely riddled in it. Unable to sleep.
My ex is moving out on Friday and I am ready for it – it needs to happen – but I am terrified of this next chapter. I will be alone, with the boys everyday, every night. I mean it’s only for three weeks until my sister moves in but it’s terrifying. Not the being alone part – I have been alone for a long time – but no, the part where I have to be a mum alone, hold the weight of the house alone and also, hold the weight of my children’s emotions as they adapt to this new life where they don’t see their dad often. Maybe a couple of evenings a week and every Sunday. I have to explain to my almost 5 year old that he will see his daddy again.
I am worried and I just hope I can do right by my boys. I can’t even really process my own emotions around this next chapter, I am too focused on the boys and… Realising that as I am writing breaks my heart a little because I never allow myself to feel anything or process anything until after the fact. Until everyone else has gotten to feel their emotions first.
And this whole ‘becoming’ journey is meant to be me stopping that – stopping putting everyone else first. But it seems I just easily fall into my usual habits. It’s not a bad thing to care for everyone else first but it does mean I keep neglecting myself and not really processing what is going on inside me. I have been saying for weeks I feel out of touch with myself, almost numb, and now I understand why. I have been bracing myself to hold other peoples emotions.
I don’t want a neat solution to this – I don’t want to say I am going to make sure I feel because that’s just not true. I am not the type to make time to go sit and feel, I would rather write it out or just randomly cry whilst applying hair oil.
Honestly, I think just recognising what I am doing is enough for now. I don’t need to fix it.
I am not numb like I think I am.
I am simply bracing.
I am preparing to hold other peoples emotions of those I care about deeply. My children have to come first for this big life change that is coming to them. I don’t want to rock their world too much so I have to stay steady for them.
Becoming, Lucy 
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