The Foundation Wasn’t Love — It Was Survival

Chapter 1: Bruised, Beaten, and Back Again

I was sixteen. Bruised, broken, and betrayed again. But this time, it wasn’t a stranger, or a boyfriend, or someone passing through my life. It was someone I was supposed to call family. Someone who should have been safe. But safety has never really existed for me not in the way people talk about it. I learned that early.

I had cut off contact with my mother and sister after learning painful truths about what happened when I was younger, manipulation, secrets, and betrayals buried under years of pretending. But in that moment, after yet another attack, I felt like I had nowhere else to go. So I did what I’d always done when cornered. I turned back, not for healing or closure, but out of survival. I called them. I let them come get me. Not to ask for accountability. Not to be seen. But because I didn’t know where else to turn.

And just like that, I picked up another secret I didn’t ask to carry and moved on.

Chapter 2: A House Full of Shadows

Coming back into my mother’s house felt like being swallowed by a storm cloud. The light dimmed the moment I stepped inside. The air was thick with tension and unspoken pain. She was with another man now, one who gave me that gut feeling you can’t shake. He didn’t work. He leached off my mum. And I couldn’t understand what she saw in him, or how she had fallen back into the same cycle. The drugs, the smoking, the drinking, it all returned with her darkness. Her presence was heavy, detached, almost ghostlike. I wanted to ask her why she let herself fall back into the same hole, but I already knew the answer: she never really climbed out.

My sister was living there too. She had clearly been through something, but we didn’t talk about it. We never really talked about anything real. She was bitter and sharp, hurling angry judgments at me like knives. But beneath it all, she was broken too. That didn’t make it easier. We both were, but instead of helping each other rise, we mirrored the dysfunction we’d grown up in.

I tried to get back into school, desperate for some structure, some sense of forward motion. But when I reached out to the people who had once taken me in, they slammed the door. They told me they weren’t helping anymore. Just like that. No compassion. No acknowledgment of the bruises, the fear, the things I had just survived. I was cut down and tossed aside, like I never mattered.

My mother didn’t fight for me. She didn’t make a plan. No school. No effort. Just words. Excuses. Silence. I was floating, untethered and invisible in a home full of shadows that whispered, “You’re on your own now” and so I did what I had always done. I disappeared.

Chapter 3: The Night I Never Spoke Of

I thought it was just another party. I went out with mates, the kind of night that was meant to be loud, carefree, a way to feel alive again after feeling so numb for so long. I was trying to reclaim something maybe joy, maybe normalcy. But whatever I was chasing, I didn’t find it.

What I found instead was something I would carry for years in silence. The memory is shattered and disjointed. But some pieces stay sharp, no matter how much time passes.

I remember the floor, hard and cold. The room spinning like I’d been dropped into a storm I never saw coming. I remember the taste of being drugged. The sour, chemical fog on my tongue. The boys. Not one. Not two. But three. They came in and out like it was normal. Like I wasn’t even human. Just a body.

I remember feeling like I was floating above myself, just watching, frozen, paralyzed. I tried to move, but I couldn’t. Tried to speak, but no words came. My limbs were heavy. My voice locked inside my throat. I had never felt that kind of helplessness before. It was like my body had betrayed me, shutting down to survive.

Each time I mustered the strength to sit up, to fix my clothes, to escape. Faced with another offer came, another drink, another arm around me and another false sense of care meant to keep me down. I went down again. Because I didn’t have a choice.

Come morning, I ran. I don’t even know how. Bleeding, shaking, aching…. I ran. That run turned into a slow walk.

I didn’t stop to say goodbye.
I didn’t look back.
I was bleeding. I was aching. I was shaking from the inside out. But somehow, I kept walking and eventually silence. I locked that night away deep inside. My body was broken, but something in me said, “This will not be the thing that kills you.”

So I kept going. But I never forgot and I made a quiet promise to myself:
This won’t be what defines me.

Chapter 4: The Dealer Boys and a False Sense of Safety

I didn’t go to the police. I didn’t go to anyone. Instead, I did what I’d always done, I protected myself the only way I knew how, I carried the secret and kept my mouth zipped, protecting others. This time, that meant surrounding myself with people no one dared to mess with. I started hanging around dealers, party boys, and street-smart survivors who knew how to navigate danger. They weren’t safe in the traditional sense — but around them, I wasn’t prey. I was invisible. Untouchable. I watched and stayed quiet. Observed everything, said very little.

I started seeing one of them, not out of love or affection, but because he gave me something no one else had: protection. The three who raped me didn’t come near him. His presence alone created distance, and I clung to that unspoken shield with him, I didn’t have to explain. I didn’t have to revisit the pain, he never asked questions. That, in itself, felt like mercy.

But safety built on silence is never real. It’s just a delay a pause in the chaos before it returns, deep down, I knew this wasn’t healing. It was hiding. I was surviving, nothing more.

I floated between houses, blowing in and out of my mother’s place in Campbelltown like a ghost, and his in Glenfield. I was there, but not really. My sister’s glare still burned when I walked in the room, her voice always sharp with judgment. But neither of them asked what had happened. No one asked why I was thinner, quieter, more withdrawn. They didn’t see me, not clearly and I didn’t feel safe enough to let them.

So I kept drifting. Unseen. Unheard. But still standing.

Chapter 5: Emancipation, Escape, and Another Broken Home

Eventually, I found the only kind of order I knew how to build, through work. I got a job cooking, something about using my hands, creating, feeding others which gave me structure. So, when I met a woman through the streets, who offered me a place to stay, I took it, and I moved in with her and her three kids.

She reminded me of my mother when I was young, before the chaos and before the damage. But it didn’t take long for the cracks to show. She was an alcoholic; there were drugs and then the men in and out. It wasn’t a home; it was just another pit stop on a survival route that never seemed to end.

I slowly became and succumb to my surroundings, I began to drink every night, passing out, was the only way I slept without dreaming and remembering each assault. Woke up for work, would skip meals. Lived like a ghost in someone else’s body. A machine programmed not to feel.

To this day, the smell of Jim Beam or Jack Daniels makes me sick.

But I kept going. Because that’s all I knew how to do.