Viv imagines a world where survivors are not in hiding

I am home, lost for words, emotional and tired. When we reached Lyme yesterday a massive part of me just wanted to keep on walking.
I really will struggle to articulate anything very coherent here but there was a rightness and simplicity in just putting one foot in front of another as a way of campaigning, raising awareness, being with my own story of childhood sexual abuse and all the other stories we met and heard on the way.

We met and spent time with so many incredible people. People who shared their own stories - not in hushed voices or private spaces - but out in the everyday - at work, on holiday, down the pub.... it felt like a small microcosm of an imaginary, possible world where survivors are not in hiding, burdened with the keeping of other people’s terrible secrets, carrying the shame of other people’s incomprehensible and evil behaviour.

Walking and talking. It felt primal. I felt embodied. I felt like after the confusion and chaos of survival, I knew clearly what my body was for and that I could give my whole self unequivocally to this action. Maybe that doesn’t make sense - I guess it’ll take time to process the whole experience.