Written: Tuesday 3rd August 2021

Ravenna, Italy

Read: Friday 5th November 2021

Bandaged Moments, Gravity Festival

The Reader, Calderstones Park, Liverpool

This is all about healing and love after negative or toxic relationships.

It’s a journey and a half but the growth, learning and happiness and peace are all yours when you perform a little bit of alchemy and convert it into something that serves you, rather than diminishes you, and I want to share that with you.

If ever, in your life, at some point, you’ve unfortunately found yourself deep in the mire of a relationship with a person who has caused you unfair, undeserved and sustained misery, you often can’t see clearly for the fog.

You’re stuck in the mud, searching for the light, searching for sense.

It’s a wretched wasteland where nothing good grows; you have no compass or torch to guide you to the exit. Somebody else’s shadow is eclipsing your light.

It takes many forms and every relationship is unique but there are plenty of patterns and behaviours in common when you read about it and the one objective in common always seems to be that the abusive partner seeks validation by detracting from other people and it’s a rough ride and it’s horrid and it’s all a ploy, it was always a ploy all along and that’s what it was.

It was a con.

It was all a hoax to con you into thinking you were lesser, inferior, unworthy.

They do this trickery because your self-esteem becomes their currency, furnishing their impoverished reserves by stealing it from you. The problem is, when you’re in the middle of this, you don’t always see it for what it is: a hoax, a con, because they cloak their sorcery with smokescreens that they’re right, you’re wrong, you got it wrong, they’re the good guys. They’re always right, apparently. Dissonance.

They do their best to dim your light. It dazzles them.

Continue reading “Some Notes on Love and What I’ve Learned and What You’re Worth” →