Sometimes I write just to survive the feelings—those big, tangled, existential messes that don’t come with tidy resolutions. Just more questions. More problems. Sometimes I pose like I’ve found answers, like I’ve emerged wiser, stronger, more centered. Spoiler: I haven’t. The writing is often just me tossing words into the void, hoping some kind of clarity boomerangs back.

Lately, it feels like I’m trudging through a sinkhole—slowly, methodically being swallowed whole. And though I keep flailing toward the surface, some days I just… stop fighting. Let the heavy particles of it all weigh me down a little more.

I have a lot of friends who want to write. And when they reach out for advice, I feel two conflicting emotions: gratitude and grief. Gratitude that they see me as a writer. Grief because I know what writing has really brought me.

Let me clarify: it didn’t bring fame, or fortune, or cathartic vindication. It brought exile. When I finally put my truth into words, I stopped being someone’s daughter, someone’s sister. I became someone to whisper about. A cautionary tale.

I wrote because I had no one else to talk to. And when I did talk, I spoke in metaphor, allegory, and late-night keyboard punches. I wrote down all the things that felt too tragic to say out loud. Not because I wanted sympathy—but because silence was slowly killing me.

People love a comeback story. They love a clean arc. “She was down, but then she wrote a bestselling book, turned it all around, and now she hosts a podcast in a sunlit room with plants in the background.” I’m… not that story. I wrote not to climb out—but to record the fall. Somewhere along the way, I realized I wasn’t writing my way out of the hole. I was building furniture in it.

And here’s the part that’s hard to admit: writing has not saved me. It has preserved me. There’s a difference.

Let’s talk about the real stuff now.

I live in California, where domestic violence laws are—as far as I can tell—a cosmic joke. I’ve been a victim for over three years. And yet, to protect the business I built from ashes and grief, I’ve had to remain silent. To protect the legacy my dead parents left me. To protect what I thought was mine.

But here’s what no one tells you: in a state like this, leaving a marriage can mean handing over half of everything you own to the person who abused you. I built my business with my hands, my heart, and the last money my mom left behind. And the system says he gets half. It’s laughable. Except it’s not funny.

I’ve done the research. I know the law. And I know that walking away means losing it all. Not just my business, but my sanity. Because the man I once loved—someone destroyed by PTSD and unwilling to get help—would unravel entirely. And I don’t have the bandwidth to watch that happen.

People love to say, “Just leave. Figure it out later.” But I’ve been jumping off cliffs and trying to build planes on the way down for too many years now. I’m tired. Bone-tired. I don’t have the strength to keep constructing miracles mid-fall.

So here I am. Writing. Breathing air in the tiny pockets I find between the darkness. Haunted by the ghosts of women who were once in my bed. Pregnant. Naked. Filmed. Celebrated. Women who broke into my home, who imagined themselves wearing my life like a second skin.

He called them perfect tens.

And told me I’d never be able to live with myself after seeing their faces.

But I do. I do live. I keep living, somehow.

I just don’t know what the point of living next to him is anymore.

And yet—he won’t let me leave. Not without a war. And in California, the system doesn’t protect the one who’s bleeding. It protects the one holding the knife.

The same man who once pointed a loaded gun at me. Who tried to drown me in a bathtub because the fantasy of a perfect online woman was more important than the real one who had been by his side for over a decade.

I live with that memory carved into my bones.

And when I look at his face now, I see a man who’s sad. Not because he’s sorry. But because he can’t recognize the woman who used to love him. And I wonder: Am I the asshole for not getting better?

That’s where I get stuck. Every time.

But maybe—just maybe—this isn’t about me being broken. Maybe the system is. Maybe we need a better set of rules. Maybe the justice system should be renamed, because “justice” is the last thing it provides.

I don’t have time to lead a revolution. I don’t have the bandwidth to testify, to lobby, to fight for reform in the courts. I’m just one woman, with a broken pen and a barely-functioning nervous system. But I can write.

And so I do.

I write this for no one and everyone. For myself. For the version of me that may one day look back and say, “That was the beginning of the end. Or maybe… the beginning of something else.”

I don’t know yet.

I only know that I’m still here. Still in the hole. Still writing.

Still alive.