Every story has a beginning, but what happens if you don’t remember that beginning? What if you realise that the few memories you have, are only of violence and neglect?

Anxiety rises, fear of abandonment is constant on your mind, fear of being unloved is eating you up, and the world you envisioned to be a fairy tale is destroyed. So, you comfort yourself by letting your mind wander, and you wait for someone to save you even after the abuse, despite knowing full well that it’s unhealthy. Knowing that those daydreams you have of dying are unhealthy.

You survived the physical abuse and the neglect by escaping reality and continually dreaming of fairy tales, but you became too engrossed in those dreams. Those dreams resulted in you creating an alternative world in your mind in which you craved to stay in – like an addict, forgetting entirely that there existed a world outside of those dreams.

This is a collection of poetry about mental illness and the impact of child abuse in adulthood.