The House, the Forest and the Longest Road – Domestic Abuse Awareness

October is Domestic Abuse Awareness Month, and this is a subject that matters deeply to me.

I have seen different forms of abuse very closely. Some things I have experienced personally. Others I have witnessed, but they still left their mark on my life.

I believe we need to talk about these things.

But I don’t particularly want to talk about them so that we can point fingers, decide who the bad people are, or collect more labels to put on one another.

There are places for those conversations too.

But the part I find myself drawn to now is what happens afterwards.

HEALING.

What do we do with the things that have happened to us?

I don’t believe something painful had to happen because we needed to learn from it. I don’t believe abuse is somehow necessary for growth. There are things in life that simply should not have happened.

But there is a distinction that has become very important to me:

I didn’t choose everything that happened to me.
But I can choose what I create from it now.

One morning recently, I woke up with an image in my mind.

There was a house on fire.

A woman was running out of it.

She ran from the house and into a dark forest.

At first I thought the house represented one particular chapter of my life. But the more I sat with the image, the more I realised it was much bigger than that.

Because we don’t build all the houses we find ourselves living in.

Some of the walls were already there before us.

There can be inherited patterns in those walls. Family beliefs. Other people’s rules. Things we learned about love, safety, money, relationships, our bodies, our worth, or what we were supposed to tolerate.

Sometimes we add our own bricks too.

Sometimes we spend years decorating rooms inside a house without ever asking whether we actually want to live there.

And sometimes there are warm rooms in it.

That matters too.

Because life is rarely divided neatly into good and bad. We can love people and still be hurt. We can have beautiful memories inside places that were not good for us. We can stay because something once felt like home.

My own house could represent more than one thing.

Relationships I have been in.

Family patterns that existed long before me.

Parts of the life I once lived.

Even the decision, years ago, to leave my home country and build a life in England could belong somewhere in this metaphor.

Different rooms. Different walls…

But eventually there comes a moment when something changes.

For me, the most important part of the image wasn’t who built the house.

It was this:

one day, I was the person who walked out of it.

And I think we often imagine that this is where stories like this end.

Someone leaves.

The door closes.

Freedom.

Except sometimes there is a forest outside.

That was the second part of the image that stayed with me.

The woman escaped the burning house, but she didn’t step straight into sunshine.

She ran into a dark forest.

Branches scratched her. The ground was uneven. Things frightened her. She couldn’t always see where she was going. Sometimes she probably wondered whether she was actually getting anywhere at all.

And suddenly I understood why that image had appeared.

Leaving something is not always the same as being free from its effects.

There can be an enormous distance between the moment we say I can’t live here anymore and the moment we genuinely feel that our life belongs to us again.

That forest can contain almost anything.

Grief. Fear. Guilt. Practical problems. Financial difficulties. Courtrooms. Other people’s opinions. Old beliefs. Trauma. Anger. Confusion. Starting again. Learning boundaries. Learning to trust. Learning to recognise your own voice after years of hearing everybody else’s.

And healing itself can be part of the forest.

There isn’t always a straight path through it.

But in the image, the woman kept moving.

And eventually the trees became thinner.

There was more light.

And she came out.

That doesn’t mean the forest disappeared.

It still exists behind her.

There may even be moments when she hears something moving between the trees.

But there is an enormous difference between being inside the forest and being able to look back at it.

I think that difference is becoming increasingly important to me.

Because something interesting has been happening through the songs I have been creating.

I can take something I once lived inside and turn it into a story I can stand outside of.

I can look at the house.

I can look at the forest.

I can look at the woman running through it.

And I don’t have to be her anymore.

I can understand her.

I can have compassion for her.

I can even be proud of her.

But I can watch her from here.

That morning’s image eventually became a song called The Longest Road.

The title came from one of its central ideas:

Sometimes leaving is the first step
On the longest road back home.

And “home” doesn’t necessarily mean a house.

Maybe home is the point where your own life begins to feel like yours again.

Your choices.

Your body.

Your voice.

Your direction.

Your ability to say yes and no.

Your ability to trust what you see and what you feel.

Perhaps that is why the metaphor feels bigger to me than the story that originally gave birth to it.

Because almost anyone can have a house.

For one person it might be a relationship.

For somebody else, a family system.

A workplace.

A belief about themselves.

An expectation they have spent their whole life trying to fulfil.

An inherited rule they never consciously chose.

A version of themselves they have simply outgrown.

And almost everyone has a forest of some kind.

I seem to be developing my own strange language for these things.

Houses.

Forests.

Noise.

Silence.

Fire.

Roads.

Maybe that is simply how my mind makes sense of experiences that were once too complicated to explain.

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life staring at the house and asking who put every brick there.

I want to understand enough to know why I stayed, why I left, what I carried through the forest, and what I no longer need to carry.

The house is part of the story.

The forest is part of the story.

But neither of them has to be where the story ends.

Sometimes leaving really is only the first step.

And sometimes the longest road we ever walk is the one that finally brings us back to ourselves.