My House, The War Zone
A home is supposed to be the one place you feel safe.
For a long time, mine was the opposite. I lived in it, kept it, paid for it - and spent most of my time inside it afraid.
I am writing this because I think it is more common than people admit. Not the dramatic version. The quiet, daily version. The one that doesn't leave visible marks.
Walking on Eggshells
If you know, you know.
It is a particular kind of awareness - a constant, low-level monitoring of someone else's mood. You listen for the tone before the words. You read the way a door closes. You adjust yourself before you've even said anything, based on how the room feels when he walks into it.
I shrank myself. Took up less space. Spoke less. Moved more carefully. Not because I was told to - but because experience had taught me that being smaller caused fewer incidents.
That is not living. That is managing.
When You Try to Speak
The thing about living with someone like this is that the problem is never just the shouting. It is what happens when you try to address it.
Every time I tried to raise something - calmly, carefully, trying to be reasonable - the conversation would twist. Suddenly I was the problem. Suddenly I had said something wrong, or misremembered, or was being too sensitive. I would walk into those conversations clear about what I wanted to say and come out of them confused, apologising, wondering if I had imagined it.
I had not imagined it.
But it took me a long time to trust that.
Bedtime
Nighttime should be rest. It was not.
Getting into bed became its own ordeal. There was screaming. There was the duvet pulled off me in the night - small enough that it sounds trivial written down, significant enough that I started dreading going to sleep.
And there was the gun. Kept at the end of the bed.
I want to be straightforward about that detail because I think it matters. A weapon in a room changes the atmosphere of that room. You do not need it to be pointed at you. You do not need anything to be said about it. It just sits there, and your body knows it is there, and your body responds accordingly.
I could not sleep properly. Not because I have sleep issues. Because I did not feel safe in my own bedroom, in my own house.
There is a difference.
What This Actually Is
I did not always have a name for what was happening. It did not look like what abuse looks like on television. There was no single incident I could point to and say: that, right there.
It was the accumulation. The eggshells. The twisted conversations. The sleepless nights. The constant, exhausting work of making myself smaller so that things stayed calmer.
That is a form of control. And it works precisely because it is hard to explain to someone who hasn't lived it.
If you are reading this and your house feels like a place you have to survive rather than live in - I am not telling you what to do. I am just telling you that I recognise it. And that it has a name. And that it is not normal, even when it starts to feel that way.
This is a personal account based on my own experience. It is not professional advice. If you are concerned about your safety at home, please reach out to a domestic abuse helpline in your country.
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