“Do to others as you would have them do to you.” Luke 6:31
Easter came.
I waited for what had already been agreed. A call, a message, something to arrange that coffee.
Because I needed that conversation.
It was my opportunity to be heard. I needed to understand what had happened. I needed to clarify what had been assumed that simply wasn’t true. I needed to say how it had affected me — in person.
It mattered.
Easter passed and there was nothing.
No message. No follow-through. No acknowledgment of what had been said just weeks before.
That’s when something shifted. It wasn’t just confusion. It was something deeper than that.
I wasn’t being given the opportunity to speak in something that directly involved me. I wasn’t being given the chance to clarify who I actually am, despite already feeling that I had been misjudged, compared to people I am not, and reduced to something that didn’t reflect me at all. And more significantly, the hurt from how I was treated and the need to speak because it involved my future too. It was my last hope.
It wasn’t only about Paul’s future. It wasn’t only about Paul.
I felt it clearly.
I didn’t have a voice in it.
And that is a difficult place to be — when something that affects your life, your dignity, your sense of self, is already being decided without you.
I had every reason to speak.
I needed to set the record straight. I needed to bring truth into something that had been shaped by assumption rather than understanding.
And I was not given that chance.
I remember how carefully I approached that first message.
Every word measured. Every sentence restrained. I knew how easily things could be taken the wrong way, and the last thing I wanted was to escalate something that should have been resolved in a simple, respectful conversation.
What had already been said before that moment is important to understand.
In those earlier messages, where I was expected to simply “accept” bad treatment without any conversation or my human right to speak (see https://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/04/once-we-repaired-things-text-that.html?m=1) — there was a line in Paul’s text that stayed with me.
He wrote, “MY ex left ME alone to think about MY future.”
I was horrified and shocked at the cruelty. That personal pain and humiliation has stayed with me. It caused me so much grief and daily tears.
His ex was not dating him. I was.
It was my life being affected. My future being spoken about, and, in that moment, placed out of my reach, without any space for me to participate in it.
What made it so difficult was not just the wording.
It’s what it did.
It was hurtful in a way that went beyond disagreement. It was degrading. It diminished me as a person with feelings, with a history, with something real at stake.
And it came at a time when this mattered more than I can easily explain.
I did not come into this unscathed. This was not casual for me.
It was, in many ways, my last hope to build something real, and I had no way of communicating that. No space to explain what I had been through, or why this mattered the way it did.
Because I could not get a word in.
Everything had already been decided.
And that is what stayed with me.
It was the weight of being reduced to something smaller than I am, in a moment where I needed to be seen clearly.
I was powerless.
At the time, I was already trying to hold myself together in ways that weren’t visible to anyone else.
As I’ve said, work was becoming increasingly difficult, and I was carrying that alongside everything else, trying to remain composed, trying to function, trying not to let everything show.
I would sit in the chapel at lunch, every day, and I would pray, always with tears. It was too much pain.
I prayed for clarity, for steadiness, for help with something that didn’t feel grounded or fair. I was afraid.
So when the tone shifted later, when the call came, calm and normal, suggesting we meet after Easter, it was an opportunity to finally be heard.
I waited a little after Easter, then I reached out.
Nothing.
That silence doesn’t sit quietly. It unsettles you. It interferes with your thinking. It makes you question what changed, what you’ve done, whether you’ve somehow lost the right to even ask.
And then you find yourself doing something you wouldn’t normally do.
You reach out again, because something important has been left unresolved, and you’re trying to bring it back to a place where it can be addressed properly.
That’s what that coffee represented.
A chance to clarify.
A chance to be heard.
A chance to restore some sense of dignity in a situation that had already been humiliating and severely frightening and painful.
Because it had already taken something from me.
I already felt misjudged.
I already felt reduced to something I am not.
And still, I was trying to approach it with care, with respect, with a willingness to resolve it properly.
But there was no space given for that.
No acknowledgement of the impact.
No recognition that I was responding to Paul from hurt, from confusion, from being placed in a position where I had no control over how I was being perceived or decisions affecting my life too.
Just silence.
That silence did more than delay a conversation. It removed it and was replaced with fear and uncertainty.
It took away my opportunity to speak, to clarify, to participate in something that directly involved me.
And in that, there was something profoundly disrespectful, because at the core of it, this was never about anything unreasonable.
It was about being treated as a human being.
Someone who deserved to be heard.
Someone who had the right to respond.
Someone whose voice should not have been removed from her own story.
And yet, that is exactly what happened.
There came a point where the silence started to take on a different weight.
I found myself wondering if something had happened to him. Whether he was okay. Whether there had been an accident. I didn’t know. Maybe that is catastrophising. Maybe it comes from what I’ve already lived through — when you lose someone to suicide, silence can carry a different kind of fear.
Call it trauma. Call it whatever you want.
But that is where my mind went.
And all of this was happening while I was already carrying more than I should have been carrying on my own. At work, I was navigating an environment that had become increasingly toxic — where I was being watched, judged, undermined, and stripped of my ability to lead and work in the way I always had. My professional life was already being shaped around me, without me.
And now, my personal life as well.
I remember driving to work one morning, trying to hold it together, and feeling that panic rise — the kind that comes when you don’t have information, when you don’t have clarity, when something important has been taken out of your control.
That’s what silence like that does.
It destabilises you.
It removes your footing.
It leaves you trying to make sense of something you were never given the chance to understand.
When I got to the office, I checked my phone.
There was finally a message from Paul.
“Hi Vicki, I’m well. Just busy with work and life in general.”
The message itself carried something I felt immediately.
Aloofness. Coldness. Indifference.
As though none of it had mattered.
As though the coffee that had been suggested, didn’t match what had come before.
That mismatch is what unsettles you the most, because you start to question what you’re dealing with. Whether you’re seeing things clearly. Whether the person you thought you were speaking to is the same person in front of you now.
It plays with you. Emotionally, yes — but also at a deeper level, because after everything I had already been through, I felt it immediately.
That coldness. That shift.
And the thought that followed was not calm or measured.
It was instinctive.
Not again.
Not another situation where I would be misread, dismissed, or reduced to something I am not. Not another space where I would be denied the ability to speak and then judged for not being understood.
I had already been carrying enough. I was extremely frightened.
Here I was again, trying to steady myself in the face of something that felt familiar in all the wrong ways.
There was no acknowledgment.
No pause to recognise what had been left unresolved.
No effort to restore what had already been offered — a simple conversation.
Just distance.
And I was left holding all of it, while trying to remain composed. Trying to stay professional. Trying to contain what I was feeling in a space that was already demanding everything from me.
And there was nowhere for it to go.
I went to Italy with this heaviness crushing my heart, soul and spirit. When there is nowhere for it to go, it goes with you.
There’s no escape.
Even in peace, I wasn’t at peace.
I had changed places. The landscape was different. The air was softer. Everything around me suggested stillness, distance, space to breathe.
But none of that reached where it needed to.
What had been left unresolved did not stay behind. It did not loosen with distance or fade with time. It came with me — quietly, persistently — sitting beneath everything, shaping how I felt, how I moved, how I tried to steady myself in moments that should have felt lighter.
That is the part that is difficult to explain.
From the outside, it looks like you’ve stepped away. That you’ve moved forward. That you’ve found some form of peace.
But internally, nothing has been put down.
Because I was never given the chance to.
I was never given the space to speak, to clarify, to restore what had been taken from me in that silence.
And so it stayed.
Not as noise. Not as chaos.
But as weight.
Carried quietly, into places that should have felt free.
Even when I left, it stayed.
To be continued…
