CHAPTER 2: THE FRACTURED HOME

“If the ocean can calm itself, so can you. We are both salt water mixed with air.”

— Nayyirah Waheed

Home was a mosaic of love and tension, a place where unspoken storms brewed beneath the surface. My parents’ divorce shattered that fragile world when I was a teenager, splitting our family like a fault line through the earth. Suddenly, one home became two, and I learned to carry my life in fragments—always leaving a piece of myself behind.

The silence was deafening; adults talked of lawyers and logistics, but no one asked how I truly felt. I swallowed the ache, the guilt that wasn’t mine, and armored myself with “I’m fine.” Dyslexia and dyspraxia already made school a battlefield, where letters danced mockingly and words tangled in my throat. I wasn’t the loudest or boldest, but I developed a quiet radar for emotions, sensing shifts in energy like incoming tides.

Those years taught me resilience, but they also buried my inner voice deep. Mum’s mantra—“You do know”—echoed in my mind, urging me to find answers within. Yet, in the chaos, I wondered: Who was I beyond the survival?