I became unable to live a full life. I was forced to make myself smaller because of other people’s projections onto me. This overwhelming desire to control me and to force me into becoming a hollowed out husk of the person I once was became a cancer. It was not killing me slowly. It was killing me quickly.

Because words were how I made sense of the world. They were how I stitched myself together. Now they were contaminated by him and by the people who should have protected me from him.

I wanted protection from him. What I got was blame and suspicion. I was treated as the lowest of the low. All my basic human rights were stripped from me and I was broken down mentally by the police until every part of me that made me whole was shattered and trampled on. Until I no longer felt human.

I gave them my full testimony and they ignored it. Disregarded it. They never followed up on a single thing I had said. Not a single incident I had raised as a victim of stalking and harassment. Not even the video footage of me meeting with an officer, where he lied to me and made promises he never intended to keep.

His lies made me feel momentarily safe, until I was woken by my front door bulging inwards under the weight of boots.

For a moment I thought it was him coming to harm me. I even thought to myself that if I just waited a minute, a neighbour would call the police. But when I looked through the spy hole it was the police. When I opened the door, startled and disoriented but docile, they told me that as I was obviously not going to go voluntarily, they were arresting me for stalking and harassment. They would be searching my home. They did this in a communal hallway where all my neighbours could see.

They seized all my devices, including a notebook, permanently tainting my ability to write. More than nine months later, they still have not been returned.

I spent over 16 hours in custody.

No shoes. Nothing to read. Having to press a call button just to be given toilet paper.

By the time I was interviewed I had not slept in more than a day. I could not follow their questions. The duty solicitor, a woman, mocked me openly. She called me a nightmare for not understanding, while the police sat across from me recording it all.

It was not a choice. It was die or speak. I had no protection from the police. No help. No support. I could not afford a solicitor of my own.

So I became Cinderwave on Instagram. At first it was just a few songs to give me something to focus on. A brief refuge in a virtual world where I felt I had some control, a little sanctuary and distraction.

Then I shared a Coldplay meme about the CEO affair scandal. Suddenly I was not invisible. People I had never met were seeing me. Other things I posted began to travel too. A month later they were still being shared.

It was proof I was not completely erased.

And I am still here.

I’m still here: @cinderwaveradio.