The Year I Started Counting

Episode 6: The Year I Started Counting

Before the shelter, there was David’s couch. Panic attacks in my sleep. A body that refused rest because the world wasn’t safe anymore.

This episode walks through what survival actually looked like — not the hashtags, but the night sweats, the silence, the isolation, and the decision to rebuild anyway.

I share what it meant to sleep in a loft bed in a studio apartment, grateful just to own a microwave again. I talk about student loans as survival, Shakespeare as a mirror, and what it meant when Roz handed me a birthday gift in the shelter and told me to celebrate every year I survived. I do now. Every year. Because I’m still here.

I talk about the kids. What it cost them to stay in touch with me. Why I backed away. And how it feels to carry the weight of building a future no one was willing to believe in.

If you’ve ever been the one rebuilding while people pretended you never existed — this one’s for you.

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Content:

• Panic attacks, trauma response
• Life in a domestic violence shelter
• Rebuilding from nothing
• Estrangement from family and children
• Abuse of narrative and power
• Birthdays as survival markers

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Listen from the beginning of the season for the full story. These episodes are layered and connected.

Don’t Call Me is written and hosted by Em.