Becoming Small

A personal story about how a relationship that once felt extraordinary slowly became a place where I stopped recognising myself.

Becoming Small is my experience of emotional and physical abuse, isolation, control and the gradual loss of the person I had been before.

At the beginning, I did not see myself as someone in an abusive relationship. I made excuses. I questioned myself. I hid things from people who knew me. And little by little, without fully realising it was happening, my world became smaller.

This is not a book about what I should have done, and it is not a guide telling someone else what they should do. It is simply an honest account of what happened, why leaving was not as simple as people sometimes imagine, and what it felt like to slowly find myself again afterwards.

I share it because sometimes we recognise things in another person's story that we have not yet been able to name in our own.