I used to think writing was about knowing what to say.
But then I realized it’s about finding out what I think.
So I stopped waiting for clarity and started writing my way into it.
It began while working on my poetry collection. The book is structured into seasons—not just the ones outside the window, but the ones we carry. Grief, growth, absence, return. Each section opens with a short essay. I had started writing one about the impact my mum had on me—her emotional unavailability, her mental illness, her physical decline, and her death when I was seventeen. But the writing kept pulling me backward—into stories I hadn’t planned to tell. I thought I was tracing my own hurt, but I was beginning to see where it had come from. I hadn’t expected that.
And yet, something in me began to loosen.
Maybe this was what the first thaw feels like.
Until then, my memories of her were physically present, but emotionally distant. I saw her through a narrow lens: from my earliest memory at four, to when she died when I was seventeen. Those thirteen years felt like the whole story. I saw her as someone emotionally unavailable, often unreachable. And somewhere along the way, I absorbed a story I didn’t know I was telling myself: that her suffering was my fault. That if I had been different—less needy, less emotional—maybe she wouldn’t have broken.
But writing wouldn’t let me stay in that story.
Building the timeline, I found long-ignored stories returning—demanding to be told, or at least taken into account.
My grandfather—her father—had fought in the trenches of World War I. He was gassed, sent home to recover, then sent back until the war ended. Discharged with what we’d now call PTSD.
When my mum was seven, he broke his back in a mining accident and never worked again. The family fell into poverty. She was the youngest of five, and the only girl. Bright at school, but pulled out at fifteen to work in a factory canteen with her mother to help feed the family.
When her mum died—when I was not quite three—my mum had a nervous breakdown. Something in her cracked, and it never quite healed.
I’d often hear my mum and my godmother talk in low voices about the “blue devils.” It sounded mysterious at first—like folklore, like ghosts. But when I asked, they’d go quiet, embarrassed. I’d already learned not to press, not to be a bother. So I absorbed more than I understood. Over time, I pieced together what they meant: “blue devils” was their way of talking about domestic violence. Not as a crime, but as something men couldn’t help. A kind of inherited affliction.
‘Blue devils’ was like code—so difficult things could be spoken aloud without being named. Every adult seemed to understand. Many had either participated in it, or been a victim of it.
My own father was never like that. But he had grown up around it. At fifteen, he tried to stop his father from beating his mother—and was beaten himself, then thrown out of the house. Both of my grandfathers were men twisted by war, undiagnosed PTSD, and lives that never gave them space to heal. My grandfather had been sent back to the front after being gassed. Back to the horrors of the trenches. What came home was a man broken in ways no one dared name.
Slowly, I began to see that what I’d lived inside wasn’t just my story—it was part of a pattern. One season in a long winter of silence and substitution. The grief hadn’t started with me. And it hadn’t started with her, either.
Seeing it all laid out—the pain that predated me—unraveled something I hadn’t known I was still holding. For the first time, I wasn’t looking at her as just the mother who hadn’t been there for me. I was seeing her as a daughter shaped by war, by loss, by absence.
The warmth, the softness, the hands-on love—I got that from my godmother. Only recently, while revisiting and reshaping some of my brother’s stories, I realized my grandmother had done the same for them. She had stepped in—intentionally, instinctively—because my mum couldn’t. She had “bad nerves,” in the language of the time.
One of my brother’s memories was of being seven or eight, sitting in the living room with our older brother while Mum told them she and Dad were splitting up. They were given a choice: stay with her in the family home, or go live with Dad—who would be staying with Grandma, Mum’s mother. My brother chose the latter. Not because of Dad, but because he wanted to be with Grandma. He wanted to go where love felt close.
That choice—the why of it—was never said aloud. But once I understood it, it quietly rearranged everything.
After that, it was unmistakable: care passed sideways, across generations, filling in where the grief had made gaps. The patience, the lessons—the things most people learn at a mother’s knee—were taught to my brothers by our grandmother, and to me by my godmother. How to cook. How to thread a needle. How to sit still with something. When I asked my mum to show me how to do those things, her answer was always the same: “another time.”
But another time never came.
And then came the emotion I’d buried deepest: resentment. Shameful, sharp-edged, and difficult to name. I wasn’t supposed to feel that—I was supposed to feel sad, grateful, reverent. But buried beneath the grief was something angrier.
Writing gave it form. Gave it permission.
I started visualizing the resentment as an anchor. It had always been attached to me. I didn’t notice it first thing in the morning. But the moment I started moving, it was there. Not metaphorical—real. A weight I carried because I didn’t know I was allowed to set it down.
Then one night, after writing through the hard things—the timeline, the history, the grief—I felt something shift. A breakthrough, quiet but real. The next morning, I braced for the weight of it to return. I expected the pull.
But it wasn’t there.
The anchor didn’t need to be untied. Just seen. Named. Let go.
Writing didn’t just help me tell the story. It shifted where the weight of it lived. It helped me see my mum as more than what she couldn’t give. And it helped me see myself as more than the child who carried that hurt.
I thought I’d let go of my childhood pain. But it turns out, I’d just buried it beneath stories I never thought to question.
Some stories need time before they can be told. But I no longer wait for understanding before I write. Writing is how I get clear.
Some thoughts still come out crooked. Some truths never land clean.
But every draft brings me closer—not just to understanding the story, but to living differently inside it.
Maybe we inherit more than pain.
Maybe we inherit the silences that surround it.
Sometimes, the story doesn’t set us free—
it shows us where we were never truly trapped.