What Five Plus Years of Leasehold Uncertainty Does to a Person
I didn’t notice when the mess at home, or the absence of personal “love”, for want of a better word, began to build. Looking back, I can see it didn’t arrive all at once. It accumulated, across two distinct periods, years apart. The first was around 2016/17, after a particularly traumatic breakup. I'd felt devalued and quietly emasculated. At one point, I truly believed we were building a future together: choosing a dog, talking about moving to Scotland , imagining a life that felt grounded and shared. When that evaporated, it wasn’t just the relationship that went; it was my confidence in myself. A new start what what I needed, work was affecting me negatively, she offered kinship, hope and promise of a life fulfilled. Then when the gaps between texts got longer she told me she’d met someone local, someone “grounded” and “supportive”. What the new beau had failed to mention was that he was also married, with two children. That revelation left me questioning not only my judgement,...