The Times Magazine 49and watched sexual abuse trials. I interviewed
a woman who’d escaped from a kidnapping.
I went home and drank to relieve the anxiety,
but I didn’t understand the root cause of it.
Two months before the first lockdown
was announced, I’d turned 30 in a rented
flat, covered in blood, my latest boyfriend
on bail for assaulting me on our six-month
anniversary. I was looking at my life alongside
a packet of antidepressants and a bottle of
wine. I knew I wasn’t supposed to drink while
on this medication, but I’d wondered what
the hell had happened to my life. I’d had it all
and lost it all in less than a decade. What was
I supposed to do next?
Drunk and zombified from half a sertraline,
I found my phone and sent a message to the
man I knew had started me on a path of self-
destruction at the age of 21. The man I knew
had changed everything with a brutal invasion
of my body, which had meant I’d let other
awful men treat me badly – married cheats
who lied and boyfriends who put an
engagement ring on my finger and then spat
in my face and pushed me around. Nothing
was ever as bad as rape, so I put up with it.
As I watched my boyfriend being led to
a police car in handcuffs, I finally started to
understand why I’d put up with him. I got
my phone and I sent the man from that New
Year’s Eve a message. I needed to speak to
him. Unlike many rape victims, I knew his
name, his occupation – which was a joke in
itself, not far off the portrayal of the doctors
in Promising Young Woman, the Oscar-
winning Emerald Fennell film about date rape
- and where he worked. I got no reply, but
I hadn’t expected one. Why would he?
Then in April, two weeks into a lockdown
in which I’d become one of those women
trapped in a dangerously abusive situation,
I finally left my boyfriend. It was illegal to
travel (the government had not yet updated its
guidance for those in abusive relationships to
just get out any time they could), but I fled
to Paddington station and boarded a train to
Bath. I lay in my teenage bedroom for weeks.
The ex called and called, threatened, begged,
screamed. He was powerful and coercive. His
control was such that I thought I loved him
so much I couldn’t live without him. I might
have gone back to him if the world hadn’t
configured to keep me away.
My mind in chaos, I wondered if I should
change career, leave what I loved for the sake
of regular pay cheques that would keep me
afloat. I googled law conversion courses and
how to become a teacher and wondered if it
was too late to train as a doctor. “I’ve always
thought you’d be a good policewoman,” my
dad said. “What?” I shrieked. I’d been arrested
in two countries for juvenile delinquency and
was still scared of the dark. “Or the Navy,”
he said. My job search seemed like one big
existential crisis, a manifestation of a nation’s
sudden inability to see the future.
Then in June of that first lockdown
summer, I got a book deal and I started
piecing together my life on the page, from
the moment I arrived in London at 23. I had
written a lot of confessional pieces, but I had
never written about rape, although I knew
it was too significant not to. Alongside the
therapy I’d been having on the phone, then
in person when it was allowed, writing Lucid,
as I’d decided to call it, was traumatising but
invaluable. Imagine writing a diary of your
life and then reading it again and again from
start to finish for each of the drafts requiredto build a memoir. That really imprints what’s
happened to you, in order, on your mind and
allows you to see the domino effect of events
that followed.
I went back over everything – every text,
every email, every diary entry I’d made in a
decade – while listening to Spotify playlists
that threw me back to the time and the
emotions I felt. I was supposed to write a
book in Amsterdam, but never got around
to it because the affair with the married man
took over everything, but now here it all was.
My life, finally.
It took me three months to write. My
therapist worried. I wasn’t ready, he said, I was
having retraumatised reactions to all the
things I’d blocked for years and there was a
“log jam” of emotion. I had set out originally
to write something filthier and funnier than
all the other millennial memoirs I’d seen,
something true to the stories my friends and
I told each other in pubs, but it turned into
something else.
Lucid is about what it’s like to be young
now and where we should go from here. Like
all lives, mine has had some darkness, but amid
the horror there was a lot of laughter, joy,
accomplishment and great relationships. My
generation, like every generation, has its flaws,
but our refusal to be silenced is our strength.LIVING WITH
INSECURITY, AS
THE YOUNG ARE
NOW, IS TOO
MUCH TO BEAR