The Thing That Once Made You Feel Small Will Make You Unstoppable
I just finished three bowls of warm traditional hot and sour soup, and now I am lying in bed writing this with a full stomach, wondering how something so simple could still carry so much weight after all these years.
When I was a child, I found a way to survive an unsafe home, and it wasn't through anger or escape, it was through a bowl of soup and a bench under a small light, and I still don't think I have ever told anyone the full story of why.
I grew up in a household full of arguments, where my sisters and I and my mum lived constantly in fear, because my step father was an alcoholic, and most days when we came home from school the house was already filled with the smell of alcohol, and we knew from that smell alone what kind of night it was going to be, before anyone even said a word.
We learned to read a house the way other kids read a room, we learned that a closed door meant one thing and a raised voice from the kitchen meant another, and we learned all of this before we were old enough to understand why a child should never have to learn it at all.
What I did with those four hours of freedom became the thing that saved me, and I still do it today, just for a different reason.