I have always known I loved girls.
Before I had the words for it, before I understood what it meant, before shame had a chance to touch it, I knew.
I knew it in the playground, when the girls would pretend to marry each other and something in my small heart felt completely at home. I knew it later, in those teenage moments that were brushed off as practice or curiosity, when my heart would flutter first and the guilt would follow after.
For a long time, I thought that guilt meant I had done something wrong.
Now I know it meant I had been taught to fear something that was always true.
But knowing who I was didn’t mean I knew how to feel safe in who I was.
My relationship with love, safety, and self-worth became tangled very young. I grew up learning that love could come with fear, conditions, confusion, and pain. I carried that into the world without realising it, searching for safety in places and people that were not always safe.
For years, I tried to become what I thought I needed to be.
I did the relationship with a man. I built a life that looked settled from the outside. A home, pets, holidays, routine, security. And for a while, I convinced myself that safe enough meant happy.
But something in me was still quiet.
Still hidden.
Still waiting.
When I entered my first relationship with a woman, I thought maybe I had finally found the missing piece. I thought perhaps this was where everything would start to make sense.
But sometimes the places we expect to feel most free can become the places where we lose ourselves the deepest.
That relationship became one of the most damaging chapters of my life. I won’t share every detail here, because some parts of my story deserve more care than a single blog post can hold. But I will say this: it changed me. It disconnected me from my voice, my body, my reality, my confidence, and the people around me.
For a long time, I didn’t know where I ended and survival began.
And leaving didn’t mean I was suddenly free.
There were years of aftermath. Years of trying to understand what had happened. Years of still looking for safety outside of myself. Years of carrying things I did not yet have the words for.
Eventually, I had to stop trying to be rescued by love and start learning how to come back to myself.
I had to be single. I had to breathe. I had to sit with the silence. I had to learn what I liked, what I needed, what I believed, what I wanted, and what my body felt like when it wasn’t constantly bracing.
And then I met Kirsty.
With Kirsty, love did not arrive as chaos. It did not ask me to disappear. It did not demand that I shrink, perform, beg, explain, or abandon myself.
It gave me space.
Space to heal.
Space to grow.
Space to rediscover who I actually was beneath all the survival.
I moved away from my hometown, and something in me began to open.
I found therapy. I found nature again. I returned to journalling, crystals, moon work, rituals, quiet mornings, honest conversations, and the slow, sacred work of trusting myself.
I began to realise I was not broken.
I had been surviving.
And somewhere within that healing, Sticks & Stones was born.
Not from wanting to simply sell beautiful things, but from a deeper place inside me. A place that understood how powerful it can be to choose something with intention. To create safety in your own space. To reconnect with beauty. To trust your own pull towards what feels right.
Sticks & Stones became part of my coming back.
A piece of my healing made visible.
A place rooted in softness, intuition, choice, self-trust, and the belief that we are allowed to build something meaningful from the parts of ourselves we once thought were lost.
So this Pride Month, I’m not sharing a perfect coming out story.
I’m sharing a real one.
Because for me, Pride is not only about coming out.
It is about coming back.
Coming back to my body.
Coming back to my voice.
Coming back to the girl who always knew, before the world made her question herself.
My pride was not born from being untouched by pain.
It was born from surviving what tried to silence me, and still choosing to live, love, create, and become.
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