Incomplete Love Letters - Help me finish my film!

I am making a film about my life, called Incomplete Love Letters. I’m halfway in. And I need your help.

TL;DR - I had a very abusive childhood and survived and escaped against all odds. The years that followed of my unbridled freedom in the world were full of the most whirligig odyssey of fever dream like experiences, intense scenarios of beauty and apprehension and uncertainty and serendipity.

I am making a film about all of it, but focusing most on the best story I have yet to date - the story of me walking from Bude to Land's end in Cornwall along the coast path, and the supernatural and transcendent things that happened as I did.

In order to finish this film, which is halfway done, I need some funds. If 500 people donate 5 pounds, I am halfway there. Any and all help is appreciated. This film is my dream. It is the song of my soul. I would be forever grateful.

If you would like a taste of some of the film art, please see the youtube video clip included in this.

If you want to know more, here is a more in depth explanation of the story behind all of this, and what happened in my life before the walk:

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This story is going to sound completely fucking insane, and all of it is 100% true. I promise. I know it sounds like I made it up, I did not.

Let me start from the beginning:

Part 1: Beginning

My childhood was very rough and I went through a lot of abuse. Something very horrible and violent that’s quite hard for me to talk about, especially to people I haven’t met, happened to me quite young. I grew up in extraordinary pain because of it. I had PTSD, but I was living with the person who gave me the PSTD, so I couldn’t mentally untangle it and stop panicking, and it stayed that way for a very, very, very long time.

I grew up wanting to die, and not even knowing that was an option or how to put it into words.

I made a promise to myself when I was a teen that if it came down to the wire and I really knew I could not stop myself from following through and really committing suicide at any point, I would at least give it all one more go and go on an adventure. Throw caution to the wind entirely and just do everything I felt I “couldn’t do”. Fuck the risks.

That kept me alive.

Every time I wanted to die in that house, something stopped me right at the very edge. This nagging little feeling of “wait. There is hope. There is something you haven’t experienced. You can’t die now, there’s a world out there.”

A world I hadn’t been able to see or interact with because I

Wasn’t allowed to talk to strangers (the whole time, even when I was 18, 19)

Wasn’t allowed to go outside

Wasn’t allowed to go into town

Wasn’t allowed to use the kitchen

Wasn’t allowed to wear clothes that I picked

Wasn’t allowed to have my own opinions

Wasn’t allowed to have money of any kind

Wasn’t allowed to know how money worked, credit cards, bank accounts, etc

Wasn’t allowed to know where any of my ID documents were or what they even were (didn’t know SSN cards existed, or what an SSN was, until I applied to uni)

Wasn’t allowed to be awake when my abuser wasn’t, wasn’t allowed to sleep when my abuser wasn’t

Etc, I could go on

The one thing I was allowed to do was go to school and do academic related things. So I decided my way out was uni.

My plan was to become some sort of genius and be so good at something that I could 1) prove to myself I could do something difficult that felt impossible, which meant I could get out of this hell, because that also felt impossible, and 2) be “important” enough that someone would realise if I disappeared or was in danger and would make sure I was ok, and I would have enough money and backing to leave

Part 2: Starting in Science

So began my career in molecular biology + biochemistry, the most difficult thing I could think to do that felt impossible for me to learn and also was interesting. I’d always wondered at how living beings, well, lived. And I think I felt like if I could figure out and understand the code that allowed for life, like a god, I could figure out my issues which felt insurmountable. That has to be true.

At 15 I started working in a lab. I went to a weird high school (it was a magnet school - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_school]) that had this biological research lab opportunity (that’s a whole other can of worms, that school was hell). I joined the research lab and started learning how to grow human neuron cells in a dish. That was probably the first insane thing I’d done. And I sucked at it! I kept contaminating the dishes. It’s a really easy mistake to make, because human cells on their own don’t have an immune system and if bacteria or fungus get introduced, they will easily kill everything. I think I went through like 15 cultures over the course of 3 months. I almost got thrown out of the lab.

But I was determined I was going to learn how to do this thing, because the hell I’d lived in for my whole life had turned me from my core personality of an infinite ocean of calmness and blue into a sort of human star supernova (anything under enough pressure will turn into a star, stars are just matter under so much pressure), and so I kept showing up and insisting on trying again until I became good at it. Actually, really, really good at growing cells in dishes. So good that I ended up growing everyone else’s cells at one point because I was now the most experienced on how to avoid every mistake you could make, because I’d made all of them pretty much.

Once I got the hang of how to take care of cells, I was asked to come up with something to do a project on. I ended up pulling this project idea out of my ass at 16 to study the mechanism of neuron cell death in Parkinson’s disease, and I discovered some relatively new things. I won an award in a very large contest in America for it (it is called Science Talent Search), which helped me when I applied to universities. I went on to do other insane things in the meantime. Like I said, human supernova. My main goal was to do as many impossible and “important” things as I could back then. So I ended up singing at Carnegie Hall in nyc and joined a university genetic engineering lab during my summer, and some other stuff.

Part 3: Columbia

My dream at the time was to go to New York City for university. I moved to America from England when I was young very much against my will, and my ultimate ultimate dream was to go back home to England, but I’d given up on that a long time ago and was told that I was only allowed to go to to university “within a thirty mile radius of the house” for no particular reason other than control. I’d spent a lot of my childhood in America staring at the lights of New York City in the distance from my bedroom window at night and wishing to go there. I’d grown up hearing the songs. “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere”. New York seemed like the place to prove to myself that I could do it, I could live, I could be in the world. It was the place where everything happens and where people go. It was the place where the airports out of that country were. It was the place. I wanted to go to New York because it felt bigger than me, and I thought if I could go there I could become bigger than myself, and bigger than my pain. And I could prove to myself that I’m not “too stupid” to live independently, which is something I was told every day.

I ended up getting admitted to Columbia University in NYC early (I didn’t apply early. I applied regular. They just admitted me before the normal admissions decisions come out - it’s called a likely letter) with a very fancy research grant that would be renewed for all my undergrad years. It was everything I thought I wanted at the time.

Living at Columbia was the first time in my life that I had been able to spend months not feeling miserable. It was also the first time in my life that I was not living with an abuser. I did not make the connection for the first 2 years. I was just happy that I felt better. Of course, I still wasn’t free. I wasn’t able to leave the campus and see the city because my location was tracked 24/7, which was part of the deal of my tuition being paid to go there. I didn’t qualify for government aid because that is determined by your guardian’s financial status, not yours, until you’re 26, and I was 18. I couldn’t get my own loans because you need a cosigner unless you have good credit, and I had no credit and my cosigner would be the one I needed to escape from by getting the loans. I had no real money of my own. So I was very much reliant on the tuition to be there. So I had to cooperate.

I wasn’t totally ok either. I was better, but not ok.

I was still in almost constant daily pain - there is a threshold emotionally for which if your emotional pain, grief, and fear and anxiety is above it, it turns to something physical. This manifested for me as migraines and daily “panic attacks” that are maybe the only true 10/10 pain I’ve felt. For reference, breaking my wrist was a 7, ripping the tendons in the front of my arm was a 9.9 maybe 10. These were 10s and every day. I’d end up on the floor doubled over in abdominal pain and it would last about an hour each time. I used to ask god to make it stop. I don’t even believe in god.

I didn’t understand what they were, I thought I had a food allergy or something. I was also anorexic and couldn’t look in mirrors.

I was the queen of nothing, that was how it felt. I was in NYC but I couldn’t go anywhere and I still couldn’t experiment and express myself because if it was somehow found out that I had, for instance, been buying my own clothes or dating someone, I’d be cut off and forced to go back to hell. So I continued to pour all of my energy and determination into the work. And I was great at it, but it was all so superfluous. Because I wasn’t a real person. It was meaningless compared to what I wanted and did not have, which was expression of my own identity and living with purpose and intention.

Part 4: The Syn Bio Lab

It was a hell of a ride though. I started working in the labs at Columbia when I was 18. The first lab I worked in was a synthetic biology lab, so their focus was on engineering living things to do new unnatural behaviours. Working here was a fever dream. I was given far too much responsibility far too quickly, and the head professor of the lab was one of the most insane people I have ever met. The entire experience was extreme and insane in every possible way. The lab was on the 24th floor of a skyscraper, with floor to ceiling windows overlooking downtown Manhattan. I used to sit in the staff break room/kitchen on my down time watching thunderstorms over the city.

At night, if you stood in the conference room in the corner where the two windows met each other, it felt like you were flying over Manhattan. You were just surrounded by all of these man made stars on the ground.

The project I was given there was part of a top secret larger project commissioned by the US army (I am not kidding). Specifically the Department of Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The grant itself for this was something like 3x the size of an NIH R01 grant, which is typically the largest grant a lab can get. It was millions and millions of dollars.

So, for context about academia: academic labs are poor. They usually never have enough grants to do everything they want to do, and the equipment you end up using is 2-3x your own age and held together by various ancient tapes and improvised repairs.

Not this lab. We were so rich. All the machines were brand new and fancy. We had our own new , which is an expensive imaging machine. For reference, there is one shared ChemiDoc for the entire biology department. But we didn’t have to use that. Because we had our own!

I could buy whatever I wanted for my experiments without really asking about price or having to justify. So I ended up buying a maybe $70 bottle of polyphosphoric acid from Sigma Aldrich (the Hermes of lab chemicals) every week. That would not fly in any other lab.

But, it was lucky for me, because like I mentioned, I did have my very own project at 18. Which most people do not have. I was not working under someone, I was on my own, with full creative direction. Honestly at the time that was amazing because I would get bored really quickly not being able to do the thinking part myself. But also, it was too much responsibility and a bit unfair.

Anyway, what I had been given was a section of the DARPA grant. This grant is awarded in pieces upon completion of individual deliverables each worth hundreds of thousands. The focus of the whole grant was to invent Engineered Living Materials (ELMs), like bricks with living things in them that can do stuff like sense the environment and regrow a broken wall. My deliverable was to invent a type of hydrobead material that could be used to sense damage to a larger structure made out of a yeast and fungus based biomaterial in order to allow for self healing.

I had no idea how to do that at all. My background was in human molecular biology, and we were working with yeast. Plus, I’d been asked to do something now that had a lot more to do with chemistry than the yeast biology itself. Because the biology part of it actually isn’t that complicated, it’s easy to engineer yeast to sense a special molecule and do something in response, like grow or tell the other fungus in the bricks to grow. It’s hard, however, to design a hydrobead material that can release this special molecule only when the larger brick is broken. That involves chemistry and materials science.

Part 5: Hydrobeads

Hydrobeads are basically science bubble tea. You know the little popping boba in bubble tea? Well, if you put those in a brick and then smash a hole in it, they’ll probably pop, right? Great, this all seems like it will work fine. However: How do you make hydrobeads that will not leak the special molecule out before they are popped? That is really hard to do. Because the special molecule is very small and likes water, and hydrobeads are, on a molecular level, essentially made of a whole lot of water, like jello. So it would be easy for a special molecule on the inside to travel through the walls using the water stored in there.

This, thus, was my impossible task. Invent a hydrobead that can trap a hydrophilic (water attracted) molecule. It’s like being asked to invent a hot ice cube.

With no clue how, I said yes. Doesn’t matter that I don’t know how to do it, they trusted me, and the deliverable is $100,000 , and it’s an opportunity to be creative. I was going for it. I read every piece of literature on the subject I could find. I found one paper where someone tried to do this and it sort of almost worked a little bit technically. But not in a truly fantastic way. So I decided to build off of that.

In order to tinker with what they did in that paper, I needed some weird chemicals (including the polyphosphoric acid I mentioned earlier) and to get crafty. Because I had to build a set up that would allow me to make hydrobeads. Which is more complicated than you’d think! It involves dropping chemicals into more chemicals from high up in such a way that you get a perfect sphere. No one in the lab had done this before, and no one was willing to teach me organic chemistry safety (which was so problematic!) so I had to pull it all out of my ass! And you know what?

After many late nights in the lab alone, failures, melting things in sulphuric acid by accident, and apparently setting things up in such a way that I had been at high risk of causing an explosion for several months before someone told me (not like I didn’t ask for training, no one was willing to coach me!), I did it.

I invented a hydrobead that could reliably trap the hydrophilic peptide molecule inside until broken by physical force by using a hydrophobic coating called nanoslic 2000 that I found on the internet.

Yay me! I was ecstatic. I finally had consistent success in my tests, and at this point I knew there was one more thing I could do to the beads to make them even better. I knew it would work, I wrote out the instructions for the experiment. But I had exams coming up, and I needed a week off to study. I decided I’d come back to the lab after the week and finish it all up, show everyone at the weekly lab meeting the final and long awaited success (I’d been presenting regularly at them, but had never had a breakthrough like this before. I was ready for the appreciation from my labmates).

Exams went fine, I came back on the day of lab meeting. No worries, I’d tell everyone my progress and let them know I’d show them the results next week. I walked in feeling good and calm, pleased and excited to share.

Then the person who I thought was my best friend in the lab presented her update for the week. And guess what it was?

MONTHS OF MY EXPERIMENTS. THAT EVERYONE HAD SEEN ME PRESENT. THAT SHE PRETENDED WERE HERS.

AND EVERYONE ACTED LIKE THEY WERE.

AND THEN.

THEN SHE SHOWED THEM ALL MY NEW SUCCESSFUL DATA. AND SHE DID MY VERY LAST EXPERIMENT THAT I’D TYPED UP IN THE WEEK I’D BEEN GONE. AND IT WORKED BEAUTIFULLY. AND THEY ALL CONGRATULATED HER AND TOLD HER HOW SMART SHE WAS AND HOW GOOD OF A JOB SHE’D DONE COMING UP WITH SOMETHING SO COOL.

I could not believe my eyes, my ears. I felt like I was melting into a puddle and I was so confused because everyone there knew it was my work because I’d been presenting it to them personally for months over and over. They knew. So why were they pretending it was hers? It sounds like I am making it up, but I’m not.

She gave me no credit or acknowledgement and walked out of the room without even looking at me.

It was brutal.

I went home and sobbed into a pillow for hours. I had worked so hard on this thing and put so much of my personal creativity into it that I was now very attached to it, and of course had had the expectation that my efforts would be recognised and appreciated. Now it was all gone.

My heart was very broken.

Part 6: Leaving

I started to notice things about the lab after that. The head professor was manipulative. They would pit people against each other and talk about others behind their backs. They would call me at all hours (which was odd by itself) to tell me other people in the lab didn’t like me. I found out they asked that labmate to do that lab presentation while I was away for the week doing exams. I decided to quit.

Quitting that job was freeing and confusing. The professor lost their mind on me. After the initial relief of being out of that environment, I fell into a deep sort of heartbreak. I had given up my whole personality to be in that lab, because it was kind of a cult. I spent all my free time there, I changed my opinions so that they matched the professor’s, because if you didn’t have the same thoughts as them you were “disloyal” and they didn’t like you anymore. My identity had become “I work for this professor”. Now I didn’t anymore and I didn’t know who I was. It was like having my organs scraped out of my body with a spoon, leaving this hollow case behind. I felt physically heavy, I was too heavy to get out of bed, walking felt like an enormous expenditure of energy, I felt like I weighed 1000x my normal weight and was being pulled into the earth. My hands were too heavy to type. Everything took me 5x longer to do than normal. I thought I was going to have to drop out of uni.

I was looking up things on the internet like how long does it take to feel better after heartbreak, because the feeling felt like it would last forever. It took three months. That was around the time when I woke up one morning and felt a bit lighter. Only a bit, but it was noticeable. And it continued like that. Until I was pretty ok.

Part 7: More Labs

I joined two labs this next time. Because I figured if one of them turned out to be crazy, I could leave and I’d still be in one. I had this anxiety about not being in a lab and wasting time in the wrong one, and having nothing to show for grad school applications. I also defined myself by what lab I was in, which was not healthy.

I joined a lab that studies the 3D growth of cancer tumours on a cellular level, and a lab that studies RNA and genes. I was truly interested in the RNA one, not so much the 3D cancer one, but I knew the people in the cancer one and they seemed sane.

I did not spend long in the cancer lab but the entire experience was a new type of acid trip esque. I was asked to inject little balls of cancer cells that had been grown in dishes into these little science jello pots that I had to make from scratch, which took ages to do every time, and then use this huge insane expensive microscope that took up an entire room, that’s how huge it was, to take 3D images of them (like an MRI). The images were beautiful. They were called Z stacks, you used a program to render them in 3D and you could walk through the cells and see everything labeled in different fluorescent colours. You could see inside of them. We had two of these microscopes, one trash one that was worth maybe $500,000. I was allowed to use that one alone. And one that was new, 1 million dollars, and had to be kept in its own special room in the dark. I was not allowed to use that one alone, because if I broke it, it would be a problem. Though I kind of got to use it alone a little sometimes when my grad student partner felt like it was ok.

Using it made me feel like I was in some sort of science fiction movie. The room was pitch black when you shut the door, except for very dim intentional lighting in places so that you knew where to put the sample and what buttons to press. The microscope was genuinely gigantic and took up the whole space. There was a chair in the middle and two touch screens with the controls for the machine. I’d input my settings and the whole thing would swivel around and shoot different coloured lasers at my sample while taking tons of pictures. It was amazing.

Despite that, I did end up quitting there to focus on the RNA lab, because that was the most interesting to me. They studied genes hidden within other genes, essentially, things you would have no idea were there and the secret ways you could find them. Your DNA does not work the way you think it does. Genes are not arranged in an organised way, one starting and then ending, and another starting and then ending. Have you ever seen those books where one one page there’s text in blue and red, overlapping? And you’re given red and blue filters, and you can put them over the page to read the opposing texts? Your DNA is like that. Except you can also read the texts backwards as well as forwards sometimes, and often there are secret messages within these texts that require you to cut out words in the middle of sentences to make a new sentence. It’s like a ball of tangled string.

This fascinated me. I loved knowing secrets (within reason). It felt like decoding secrets.

I committed to this lab, and then the pandemic happened. The university shut down, and I went back to hell.

Part 8: Pandemic

That was one of the most dark periods in what was my recent life at the time. I was locked in hell with my abuser every day with no breaks and no outside contact. I was losing my mind. I was getting abused every day, and this person went out of their way to actively exacerbate any painful emotion I had. It was finals week and so this person trashed my room, took my desk, and threw all of my books onto my bed. I kept reaching a breaking point and would have to talk myself down over and over. It was torture.

I needed something to do. The lab was my escape in so many ways at the time. But I couldn’t go there. So I decided I would make my own.

I had no idea how to code and knew very little about computers beyond how to use one in a generally layperson way, but I was going to teach myself bioinformatics right now because I needed something to do.

So I did that. I taught myself bioinformatics and R. And I asked the RNA lab professor for a topic to study, he gave me a very vague “look into these genes and just see if anything interests you”, and thus I started my own project. I looked into those genes and something did interest me. Long story short, one of them had a very unusual amount of secrets in it. I dove in and over months ended up discovering something pretty interesting about its secrets and how they seem to have something important to do with how babies develop in the womb (something science still doesn’t understand really).

The project absolutely took off. The professor was amazed. Fall came around and the university was letting some people back, including science students who wanted to use the labs. I asked to come back and was approved.

In the meantime, COVID had given me time to think. I’d been living with my abuser with absolutely no breaks for months on end now, like neither of us could leave the house and thus I was always around it. And the experience I’d had with the crazy professor had planted a question in my mind. If it wasn’t ok for her to act like that, why is it ok for this person I live with to act like this?

Because I hadn’t fully admitted to myself that I was being abused, this was the first time I had asked myself this question. In my head, I had reached breaking points many times when I knew this was all insane, but I had always gone back into denial after, convincing myself I deserved it, it was somehow fine, it was the way it is supposed to be, etc.

But now it was becoming more concrete, and this voice in the back of my head was starting to become a constant, faint, reliable whisper. Why is it ok for this person to act like this?

Part 9: Realisation

It was only once I was living at Columbia again that I got my answer.

I had moved into some of the most beautiful housing the university has for undergrads. Not for its interior, which was outdated and had a cockroach issue, but for the view. I was living in the East Campus skyscraper apartments, on the 12 floor, which was actually moreso the 24ish floor. I could see the entire city, downtown, and all the way east to queens. I could see everything. I could see all of Harlem. I could see the Apollo theatre sign, actually, from my living room window.

I was aware that it was likely the only time in my life I would have this million dollar view from a place I lived in.

I moved in. About a month in, I was walking down the stairs from my living room to the bathroom (the apartment was a duplex), when I remembered it. I remembered the horrible thing. It had always felt like a dream, then it hit me all at once. That was real. And the person you’ve been asking this question about is the one who did it.

Why is it ok for this person to act like this?

It isn’t.

It isn’t.

It isn’t.

That person is a sexual predator.

I collapsed onto the floor of the bathroom and spent the entire night there throwing up and crying. It felt like the world had just shattered and all the shards of glass had fallen onto the floor, breaking the illusion of 3D and taking all colour and shapes with them in 2D planes, leaving a white void in its place.

Everything was going to change. Because I had to go.

But I didn’t know how to go?

I sobbed to the lady on the RAINN hotline.

What do I do? What is going to happen?

Something has to change, she told me gently.

I didn’t know how money worked. I’d never bought my own groceries, really. I didn’t know anything, and I had grown up hearing every day some variation of “you are too stupid to live in the real world”.

But I had no choice now. I was terrified. It felt like a death sentence. Enter the “real world”, alone, me, a lady who has been judged by people much older already in it, too stupid to be in it, and who has never been allowed to be a real person.

I felt entirely overwhelmed. And I was going to do this. The decision had been made.

Part 10: Plan

When you’ve been trapped with an abuser for so long you end up developing Stockholm syndrome to justify to yourself why your living situation is acceptable when it isn’t. One effect of this is you have a hard time remembering instances of abuse when you try to directly recall them. Your brain blocks them out. I needed to be able to not collapse in on myself like a failed piece of origami. I had one shot at this escape. I needed to be sure I would not convince myself to go back. I needed concrete reminders of why this was wrong, what happened, etc.

I looked up what a narcissist is and read the informational article I found on google. As I was reading it, instances of abuse popped into my mind, but when I tried to grasp them, they slipped out of my hands like a fish in water.

So I put on the most mindless unrelated music I could think to listen to at the time, which was ariana grande, and got really absorbed in the song and singing it, and just so happened to let small little bits of memories seep into the back of my mind as I totally focused on this music, and didn’t look at them directly or pay any attention to them at all, just happened to write them down on a piece of paper as they came while not really caring.

I did this for about an hour. By the end I had a list of instances of narcissistic abuse committed by this person. The list was 10 pages long, front and back, in my tiniest handwriting. I promised myself I’d keep the notebook forever. The memories couldn’t hide from me now. I was getting out and not turning back.

It was around now that I looked at my transcript and realised I had had a fantastic accident. I was in my 3rd year of uni, in the spring semester. My degree was a 4 year degree. But, by some miracle, I had almost finished an entire related 4 year degree, biology (rather than biochemistry) already. I couldn’t finish the biochem one without an extra year, because it required physical chemistry, which was only taught in the Fall. But that’s ok. I could be done by the end of June with biology if I take a couple of summer classes. And because of COVID, this year’s summer classes were discounted.

I created a budget. That was the next step of the plan. I had a bank account that I shared with my abuser, that was only for my money (I just wasn’t allowed to have my own account by myself). I opened a new account and moved all the money into there. I then sat down and wrote out a couple possible scenarios: I was in my 3rd year of uni. I still needed spring tuition paid, and then I need to pay for the summer myself. Because once spring tuition is paid, I disappear. For good.

If spring tuition isn’t paid, how will I pay it?

I looked into every possible option for this and found one sketchy loan company, RocketLoans, that would be able to give me a loan big enough for just the spring semester on short notice without a cosigner as a one off. So worst case scenario, I use that for the spring.

Summer - I had enough money to cover.

If I needed the loan, there would be a downpayment.

So I calculated how much money I’d have left for everything else in each scenario. Worst case scenario, I had enough for 3 months food and rent once I moved out of Columbia in the summer (according to how much groceries cost from a google search, and how much average rent is in New York).

Best case scenario, I had 8 months.

I didn’t realise I was relatively rich. I thought I was poor and this was nothing, because any time I had tried to have conversations about money with my abuser, that person would tell me, oh, $20,000? That’s nothing! You won’t survive a month!

But now I had hard proof that the money I had earned over 3 years of working in labs over the summers and getting personal grants could support me for a good amount of time.

I could do this.

What I’d do after, I don’t know. I’d never had a real job that wasn’t tied to some sort of academic fellowship. But people do it all the time, so I must be able to too.

Part 11: Rebirth Day

My tuition was paid. I blocked the number on the 22nd of January, 2021. I put that date in my calendar as my rebirth day.

I had to actually restrain myself from calling my abuser, however. The physical compulsion to pick up the phone and call was so intense that I had to actively consciously keep myself from doing it and keep my phone in weird places. That lasted over a month.

I had also broken my left ankle, and was unable to walk. Which sucked living in a duplex apartment because it meant I had to climb up the stairs like a demon out of hell every morning to get to the kitchen and front door, and slide down them on my ass to get to the bathroom. I ended up sleeping on the couch most nights so I wouldn’t have to deal with the stairs.

I was scared, felt ugly (though that was not new), temporarily physically disabled, and scared. Very scared. I felt lonely.

I had this thing where I would start to overheat and I could feel my face burning up and it would just get worse. My roommate kept this jug of Vermont maple syrup in the freezer. I would take it out when I was alone and put it on my face and forehead to cool down (sorry Lucinda). It helped. I’d let out huge sighs of relief and slump into chairs.

I had to get a restraining order against my abuser because I was getting emails, voicemails (despite me blocking the number), packages sent to me. It was terrifying. It was escalating. Columbia’s SVP (like RAINN) helped me get the restraining order. The court was all over the phone because of COVID. I could barely function, the SVP lady helped me fill out the form and was so kind. The judge read the statement I wrote and just asked me “Is this true?” I said yes. She gave me the maximum possible emergency restraining order she could. A hearing was scheduled to get the permanent one (which only lasts a couple years at the most, which makes no sense). I was curled up into a ball during the whole thing. I was in a state where one tap would’ve made me shatter like glass under uneven tension. I was on the edge of shattering.

At the time I thought the judge was mad at me or something when she asked me if what I wrote was true. Now looking back, I realise she was just shocked at what she read. She was just reacting as a human.

The temporary order lasted 3 months until the next court date.

That meant I had three months to live.

For the first time in my life. For. The. First. Time. In. My. Life.

I had

3 MONTHS

Without the abuser.

To do WHATEVER I WANT.

OH MY GOD.

I’D NEVER HAD THREE MONTHS.

I’D NEVER HAD ONE DAY.

Three months felt like an eternity.

I could be a real person.

I could go to restaurants.

I could go to Brooklyn.

I could PICK MY OWN CLOTHES.

I could have my OWN OPINIONS.

Oh my god.

I felt free and lighter than light itself.

Like I could float on air.

I started dressing in ways I thought were pretty. I put a silver chain bracelet in my hair as an accessory. I started wearing clothes to express myself more, not necessarily for “what they were for”. I started wearing makeup (something else I hadn’t been allowed to do).

I hadn’t had my style entirely worked out yet, but I was taking stumbly messy baby steps. I was starting.

I had to go back to the town where hell was to collect my things from someone who was able to get them out of the house for me in secret. He got most of my things that I wanted and needed for me, including my favourite jacket. It was a $1,000 designer jacket from Lafayette 148 that I bought at 80% off at the grand opening of a store. It was maybe the one of the only pieces of clothing I owned that I picked myself. My abuser had given me absolute hell for it.

He also got me my passport. Which was in date, and the only form of ID I had.

I had gone to collect the things with David, my best friend from Uni. We had been best friends since the first day of classes. He had been in love with me for 3 years. I was in denial about it.

I went back to New York, and everything started to fall apart just right. I realised that I couldn’t take everyone with me.

Part 12: Loss and Gain and Loss

You think when you leave an abusive, dangerous environment, you can take the people you loved and had connections with while you were in that environment, with you. You think you can make them see it too, or help them get out too, or that they’ll change too, etc. That the whole thing isn’t linked by some underlying thread of commonality, whether that be someone’s willingness to tolerate abuse in some cases, or their tendency to be abusive in others.

You assume this one variable will drop out and the entire rest of the equation will still work.

It doesn’t. The whole equation falls, and you have to build a new one over time starting from scratch with entirely different variables and numbers.

You have to start over.

I started to find that out. Once I took the mask off one relationship, I couldn’t unsee the similarity in others. I had to lose them.

Spring semester finished, I moved out of Columbia. I moved into an apartment in Brooklyn with some roommates I met on Facebook (don’t do this!).

As my relationships had been falling away, I had started to tell David everything. He was the first person other than my abuser to see me cry. He would stay with me on the phone for hours comforting me as I cried and fell apart and worried. He told me he’d be my family now.

I had gotten a job working at the RNA lab at Columbia as full time research staff, continuing on with the project I had started during the pandemic. It was really, really taking off. I had just won the Goldwater Scholarship (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_M._Goldwater_Scholarship), which was an absolutely huge deal career wise, because winning that is like winning the Rhodes scholarship. I could go anywhere I want for grad school now.

I was taking a ballet class to meet my credit requirements, which was helping me regain use of my left leg that had atrophied from being unused while my ankle was broken. I was living in Brooklyn, taking an incredibly long train ride that involved a transfer at Fulton street (the worst subway station for transfers in all of New York, I am convinced) to get to Columbia every day of the working week. I was buying my groceries from trader joes. My roommate had a kitten named Opal that I liked to hold and show stuff on the kitchen countertop to, since she couldn’t get up there. I’d started to realise I’d rather not go to grad school because I wanted to start living with a decent salary and explore other areas of my life.

I finished summer classes and graduated from Columbia with a degree in biology, with departmental honors, magna cum laude, 4.03 GPA, I.I. Rabi Scholar.

Then everything imploded again.

It was becoming increasingly clear with time that my roommate with the kitten was insane. There was a third roommate, who was ok, but Alyssa was not. Alyssa had issues. I didn’t think they would affect me until they did. She did not tolerate being told no, or boundaries of any kind. She was telling me I wasn’t allowed to talk to our third roommate (?) and I told her that made me uncomfortable. She lost her mind on me and told me she wouldn’t be liable for what she is going to say now because I made her angry. Big red abuser bells went off in my head. Time to go! Only, I live here? I signed a lease with them! That lasts for 6 months! And I’ve only been here like 2.5? And, I can’t meet the income requirements to sign really any lease on my own without a guarantor! The person I used as a guarantor for this one is someone I lost when I realised they were not healthy. What do I do now?

I had this crisis in an office at the back of the lab at Columbia with the door shut that I typically used for my zoom meeting classes. I called David and sobbed into the phone while I hid under the desk and felt like the universe was shattering inside of me. I felt like I was going to die. I had found a place to live, and now the same thing that happened before is happening again? I live with a dangerous person again? Why is this inescapable? Am I not trapped now? This can’t happen now! I have nowhere to go! But I refuse to be trapped again! The world is ending. This is the worst thing I can imagine happening, and it is happening.

I let myself feel the shock of the worst thing I can imagine happening that I did not think would ever happen, in fact, happening. I considered killing myself. Then I decided to figure it out. I felt like there was no way out, but there had to be. I read the lease and found the subletting clause. I texted my landlord to let him know I needed to move out and would find a subletter. He said ok. That was when I knew it would be ok, because I was not trapped by the contract.

I decided wherever I would move, I was not having roommates.

Then I went to Brooklyn, collected a bunch of my stuff into a suitcase, and took the suitcase and the one piece of furniture I wanted to keep, my bureau, with me on the subway. Like a true New Yorker. You don’t need a moving truck when you can bring your furniture on the subway.

And I brought all my stuff to David’s apartment. He let me sleep on his couch while I figured out a temporary solution - an AirBNB in queens that I could rent for a month. In that month, I would find a permanent apartment. How? I don’t know. But I would.

Part 13: What’s wrong with me?

I moved into the place in queens and began a month that was, in a new way, the most stressful month of my recent life. I woke up every day feeling like I was going to throw up. I was taking trains all over the city in the muddle of the work day to see a random montage of studio apartments in every area of Manhattan. Show up to work, leave for “lunch”, see apartment, come back. Luckily I was pretty unsupervised. My email and texts were full of real estate agents contacting me about apartments I’d found on StreetEasy.

Why only Manhattan?

I had been sitting in my bed in queens, thinking to myself, where do I want to live? Manhattan was my home and I felt homesick living in Brooklyn. Also, I’d found that there were certain areas of Manhattan, and one area in Brooklyn, actually, that I really felt like were just home to me. But funnily enough, they were not always places I’d been frequently. I sat for a minute thinking about why this was. Then I realised what they all had in common: I had gone with David to all these places. That’s when I realised that he was my home.

What’s wrong with me. I’ve never felt this before.

Surely I’m not in love. I don’t want him to touch me. I’ve never been in love, but it must involve that, and that still freaks me out given the experience I’ve been through.

The next time I went to David’s place, I realised how beautiful his face was. He was wearing glasses, I didn’t know he even had glasses. He always wore contacts. He looked so good in those glasses. I loved it. What’s wrong with me.

He was cooking dinner for us and his roommates and I noticed while helping him wash the dishes that his hands were so beautiful. He had really attractive hands. I wanted him to touch me.

What’s wrong with me.

I’m in love.

I sat in a chair in the corner and quietly mouthed a song from tiktok that popped into my head and described this realisation. I was wrong.

I’m Stan, and I was wrong…

I am in love with David.

It hit me like a train.

Part 14

Entry made in July 2021

____________

I am having an exhilarating whirlwind of the past 6 months.

I cut off my abuser. I graduated from Columbia a year early. I got a job. I realized I don't want a PhD and I don't have to be poor, I can get a better job in industry. I broke a lease because my roommate was abusive. I've been choosing myself.

It's been terrifying and wonderful and empowering and exhausting. For the first time, I can feel my feelings. All of my feelings. I didn't know it could be like this.

The most scary part has been trying to find a place to live, because my abuser used to tell me I would never be able to (they wanted me to feel like I couldn't support myself so that they could trap me and I wouldn't leave the abuse). So apartment hunting has been hard, the first time I did it and now.

Anyway, let me tell you about my best friend. He's the first person that I've had an emotionally healthy relationship with. He validates my feelings. I don't have to prove why something was bad, when I tell him, he just listens. He listens to me cry, he listens to me when I'm angry, he listens to me when I'm scared. When I needed a place to sleep he let me sleep on his couch. When I was scared I would be homeless and broke, he told me I'd be ok because I have him.

I trust him. He's shown me again and again through how he treats me and his actions that he is a good person. I know he won't hurt me. I've never felt like that about anyone before.

Just recently, I noticed myself looking for apartments in specific parts of the city because they felt like "home". And I wondered why. I'd never lived there before? I'd never even spent much time in those areas before.

Then I realized they felt like home because they were places I've been with him. Those locations aren't in and of themselves home. He is.

I just want to be around him. I don't *need* him, I am my own person. But I like to be around him. He makes me feel safe. We can talk about anything, do whatever. I don't mind. It's fun because I'm with him.

I've definitely never felt like that before with anyone. It's weird, though. I thought if you're in love with someone, you want to have sex with them. I don't want to do that. I just want him to be happy and happy with me. Maybe hold hands.

I'm smiling like an idiot.

Thank god I've made the choices I have. Thank god I can feel this.

________________

Part 15: Flying

That month, that July felt like flying. Like I was a bird that had never flown before, and now I was clumsily and shakily flying in between clouds high above the ground, terrified and free and feeling the wind in between my feathers. I would ride the 7 train back to queens every night above ground through Long Island city, peer out the windows as it wove between lit up skyscrapers in the black ink of the evening. Flying. Feeling my jaw clench and my stomach drop as I took yet another train to a random neighbourhood to look for an apartment to rent, not sure where I’d be in a month. Flying.

Falling in love with David and feeling every new sensation of it. Colours were brighter, food tasted better, music sounded better. Getting drunk in clubs downtown with him and giggling over being on a list for a party. We’re fancy people now! We fell over each other drunken giggles at the fact that we got to cut the club line. Flying.

Realising suddenly I did want to sleep with him. Even though it terrified me still. Flying.

I found an apartment. I almost signed a lease for a terrible studio apartment in a murdery back alley of a neighbourhood in Brooklyn, whose window opened up right next to above ground train tracks, when I found the one. By some miracle, I found an apartment in Manhattan, next to the 1 line only 15 minutes from Columbia by train, that was a true 1 bedroom. And completely renovated. Separate living room and kitchen separated by French doors (that was my fantasy feature that I didn’t think I’d get - French doors!) gas stovetop, oven, stainless steel full size fridge, floor to ceiling windows, pre war building, a bath tub (!), hardwood floors, and a view of the entire downtown skyline and surrounding lush hills (apartment was in inwood). The view was insane and beautiful beautiful for New York. And because of covid and rent stabilisation, it was only 1350 a month. For the whole thing. And they were willing to let me sign without a guarantor.

It was meant for me.

I said yes.

And suddenly I had a very beautiful house.

And as that fell together, other things fell apart.

I spent my evenings at Brooklyn bridge park riding bikes through the artificially wooded piers at sunset, watching the colours change between the towers of the financial district as I listened to Qveen Herby’s “Alright”

Everything’s gonna be alriiiight

Everything’s gonna be alright

Everything’s gonna be alriiiiight

Part 16: I tend to hold onto things after they’ve died.

I went to court for the permanent restraining order (yes, remember that?). I got it, though it only was for a year overall including the previous, which was frustrating but still a win.

But things were falling apart with David. There were some issues in the beginning that were getting more pronounced now. He was spending all his time going out with his female roommate and ghosting me for weeks. I told him it hurt me, he told me I must just be jealous of him because he’s so popular.

I decided to just let him go. I sank into the new mattress that just arrived at my new apartment. I didn’t have a bed frame yet, so it was just on the floor. I laid on it and felt myself sink into an abyss of pain inside. I can’t believe I’m losing him. I love him. He’s been the last three years of my life, we talked every day since 2018, we were attached at the hip. I couldn’t stop crying. I can’t have him be gone. God it hurts so much.

He didn’t want to lose me either. We talked to each other a couple days later and he, on the verge of tears, begged me not to go. We talked about what has to improve. I thought things would change.

We went to the MoMa and I couldn’t really look at the exhibits because he wouldn’t wait for me when I stopped to see something. I just had to follow him through.

Why doesn’t he wait for me? I wait for him.

That was a common theme now beyond museums.

Things did not get better with him, they just kind of got worse. Everything came to a head one day when he broke my trust in a fundamental way. I confronted him about it and he begged me to stay and said he’d be better. Then 2 weeks later he dumped me and told me he never felt anything about me. I shattered in every dimension at once.

As I walked out of the room, the last thing I said to him was: I tend to hold onto things after they’ve died.

I went home and ate an entire pint of raspberry sorbet, then cried so hard I threw it all up.

I couldn’t sleep. I certainly could not sleep in my bed. I slept on my mini couch, barely. For weeks.

I couldn’t eat. I didn’t want to eat.

I saw him everywhere, in the face of every stranger who looked vaguely like him. In the corners of rooms at Columbia that we used to hang out in. In the walks between buildings and the way the edge of the roof of Mudd frames the sky. I saw him everywhere.

I couldn’t imagine the future without him. He was in all of my plans. Everywhere I wanted to go, I wanted to go with him.

It took me three months to feel ok. It took me 5-6 to feel good again and stop missing him all the time.

Part 17: Ups

Those months had ups and downs.

I dyed my hair platinum blonde. I had always wanted to do it, I wasn’t “allowed” to back in hell, then when I was with David I brought it up once and he said it would look bad. But now I was single and I knew it would look amazing, so I went and did it.

That night when I came home was the first time in my life I looked in the mirror and actually saw my face.

The body dysmorphia from being abused for years was so bad that I thought I was ugly. But now, changing my hair colour allowed me to see my face accurately. And Oh my god. I was beautiful.

I was beautiful.

I was so, so beautiful.

I felt beautiful.

I felt like me.

I’d never really felt like me before, particularly in how I looked.

But now the outside matched the inside.

It was like 11pm at night by this point because I napped before looking in the mirror when I got home. But I knew I had to go out.

So I went to the Brooklyn bridge and walked across it at midnight, looking like me, feeling so so beautiful.

Soon, thanksgiving came and I was determined. Though I was spending it alone, I was going to have a full festive thanksgiving. Because it was my first one without my abuser, who made me feel like I couldn’t do things on my own. So I had to do this, and I had to do it all the way.

I went to various grocery stores around town - Trader Joes, Morton Williams, and Westside Market, and bought everything

Turkey, stuffing, pigs in blanket, Mac and cheese, potatoes, celery, corn, baguettes, gravy, Brussels sprouts, etc. Brownie mix and fancy ice cream and a huge box of chocolates for dessert. And fancy strawberry soda that actually didn’t taste that good for drink.

It took me all day to cook it all, seriously something like 12 hours. Cooking an entire turkey intimidated me greatly. Unpacking it was a creepy experience. It was huge and looked far too much like an actual animal, which it is, but it’s still a shock. I’d only ever cooked things like bacon. I didn’t know how to cook this.

I followed the instructions I found on the internet and it actually came out nice. Everything came out nice. Except for the attempt at cheese bread, for which I used far too much butter, that was disgusting.

But all in all, it was a success. I did it! I was dining at midnight. It was already the next day, technically. And I made way, way too much food. I think I ate like a mouthful of each thing. But I did it. I did thanksgiving.

I did the same thing with Christmas, minus the cooking. I didn’t feel like cooking for that. I did, however, know that I unequivocally needed a real, full size tree, because it isn’t Christmas without one. And my abuser stopped letting us get trees for years. I missed trees, and now I could finally have one again. No one could stop me this time.

I had no ornaments, so I went to target to buy what I could. I bought a ton of cheap plastic ones (it’s what they had), some lights, and a star. Then to get the tree- in Manhattan around Christmas, street vendors sell full size trees on the side of the road. I found one in morning side heights. I asked how much his largest tree was - maybe about 8 feet tall. He said 300 dollars. I paid him and then I was on my own with this monster of a tree. You have to picture it - a lithe platinum blonde lady with a full face of makeup carrying a humungous 8 ft tall tree alone. It was so heavy and difficult to do but I was going to do it dammit. I brought the tree on the subway (bringing large unusual things on the subway was something I was familiar with - that’s how you know you’re a NYC local). Which looking back was hilarious. I had to carry that thing out of the subway up five flights of stairs to my house. It looked amazing in my living room all lit up though. A real tree.

Oh, and that’s another thing - fancy clothes! I’d been buying my own clothes. I always loved fashion. I used to watch project runway religiously when I was 10. I’ve always had an amazing eye for style and beautiful things. And now I could wear what I wanted instead of showing up to events looking ridiculous and frumpy in clothes I didn’t pick (which was so humiliating). I had a day where I went through my entire closet and threw out all of the old clothes I hated. I ended up with two huge garbage backs of clothes. It was like that song.

“I threw your shit into a bag and pushed it down the stairs”

I literally did that.

Now the only clothes in my closet were clothes I actually liked. Every item was a piece of clothing that made me feel beautiful. It was a new concept for me. It felt amazing.

I didn’t realise how much I had hated my closet before until then.

I had the most fun going to Zara and just buying whatever I wanted. Not having to worry about whether or not it was “too sexy”. Not having to feel sick to my stomach because my abuser was going to insist being in the dressing room with me, watching me undress, and was going to make predatory comments about every piece of clothing and touch me without my consent. Dressing rooms could be fun now. Actually fun. I could feel safe in them and get to have fun. And buy the thing that makes me the most happy and makes me feel the most beautiful.

I’d never liked shopping before. Now I loved it.

And now my true style started to find me.

Part 18: Downs

And yet, January was a low. Because that was the month the restraining order ended. And that was the month my abuser tried to interfere with me at my job. That was terrifying. I had to go back to court. I almost killed myself. I wrote 3 suicide notes in the span of a couple of weeks. I thought this meant the hell would never end and I would only get temporary periods of peace. My lawyer was court assigned and pretty useless. He betrayed me in a major way and that broke my brain a bit. Finding a new lawyer meant encountering some terrible people, one of whom said something horrible to me about how I deserve to be stalked, which caused me to almost commit suicide. My best friend at the time tried to help me, but she had a hard time seeing beyond herself and didn’t understand why I wasn’t able to help her with her wedding planning the weekend after all this happened when I had already explained that I wouldn’t be fun to spend time with because I was having an emergency and needed to rest and plan. That lead to the breakdown of the friendship.

I felt so hopeless. I called the domestic violence hotline hoping to be able to get some emotional support. That hotline is very hit or miss, some people are lovely, others are very dismissive. I was lucky that day. I met Lou.

She listened to everything I had to say and said the most caring things to me about how I didn’t deserve it, she validated my feelings and helped me feel like I wasn’t just crazy or something. She made me feel safe and not alone. She saved my life.

Thank you Lou.

Part 19: Stepping into my power

The year continued on. I started getting 20 years of pent up anger out by smashing plates at a rage room in Brooklyn. For $60 an hour, you could smash 10 plates and 2 large electronics with a crowbar or bat of your choice. The first time I went, I couldn’t throw the plate hard enough for it to smash. I was too scared to let myself be angry, because I hadn’t been allowed to be angry before.

I took a deep breath and gave myself permission to get angry.

Then I threw the plate with all of the force in my body and it shattered against the wall into a billion pieces.

I threw all the others in succession at the speed of light and proceeded to absolutely destroy a VCR machine with a crowbar.

It was like this for a while. I went back many times, maybe every other week for months. I got the anger out. I stepped into my power. I am not weak and unable to defend myself. I can be angry. And anger isn’t a bad thing. Because it does not make me abusive. I would never do this to a person. But it’s good to know I can be strong, and I can fight back. I can break things.

I quit my job. Multiple crappy things started piling up at that lab in Columbia, not like the first lab, but still issues enough that they all compounded and I realised it was time to go. I quit and took all of my lab notebooks with me this time, so no one could steal my thesis again. I couldn’t go through that again. I also took all my DNA archives with me, just to be extra sure. I kept them in my freezer in my apartment.

I took a couple souvenirs also. An Erlenmeyer flask, some gloves for washing dishes (nitrile gloves are great), a small amount of agarose, a couple other things. Some parafilm. I think a graduated cylinder.

I also did one more thing before I left for good, because I knew at this point I didn’t want to do science anymore really, and I probably would never be in a wet lab again. I decided to taste some things I had been dying to taste for years. 2 things, to be exact. MilliQ water and L broth.

Part 20: Tasting menu

MilliQ water is the purest water that exists, to my knowledge. You might think you have tasted pure water before, but you haven’t. All water you’ve drank (unless you’ve drank deionized water against the rules from a lab) contains ions. Like dissolved salt. This is normal, inevitable, and good for you. You need it to contain these ions or else it will mess up your cells as you drink it due to a process called osmosis. And not in a slow way, in a very immediate way, actually. It’s kind of like this - imagine you were to fill your mouth with pure table salt and let it sit in there for 10 minutes. Then swallow and repeat. Your mouth would be all raw and dry and horrible. Drinking true, pure water without the ions would be like that too. Except actually, it would probably be much worse, because believe it or not, the lack of ions that you’d get with pure water as opposed to the overload of ions that youd get with the salt will damage your cells so so much more. It will actually rip them open violently.

Everything is a balance in biology. You never want too much of something. You don’t want too much salt on its own, and you don’t want too much truly pure water on its own. You need a mix.

Anyway, MilliQ water is deionized, meaning it is pure water - it doesn’t have the ions. But that’s not all. It goes one step further than that. Because deionized water is honestly just run of the mill stuff in science. You can get it anywhere in the science world, in any lab, by the gallon. It isn’t special. It often comes in a big ancient plastic container with DI WATER written on it haphazardly in sharpie. Sometimes, labs have their own sink faucet tap for it. It’s not luxury stuff. It’s the discount option.

No, MilliQ water is very special. MilliQ water is deionized water that’s been run through a series of expensive filters remove, now, not only all the ions, but every thing in the water ever other than the water molecules. Deionized water still has viruses, bacteria, little bits of lint, other stuff in it. Just the ions are out (how they do that likely involves something called ion exchange chromatography which I don’t feel like explaining right now). MilliQ water has all this stuff removed. MilliQ water is pure water. It’s a bottle of only H2O. It comes out of this very fancy looking machine in the lab from the most prestigious and luxurious faucet you’ve ever seen.

You think you’ve had it fancy drinking Fiji water or Voss. No. No one knows what true pure water tastes like.

But I am about to.

I’ve wondered about drinking MilliQ water for years. The first time I’d encountered it was when I was 15 and had just started working in labs. I was told to never ever drink it ever. And so I did not. But the curiosity stayed with me. A little seed had been planted in my head. What does pure water taste like?

As I got older and went to uni, I encountered it again. I asked a grad student I was working with in the first lab, what would happen? She made it clear it would probably make me sick. I moved on to the 3D cancer lab, and I asked a different grad student, what do you think would happen? She told me it would kill me.

I moved onto the RNA lab and asked a lab tech what would happen? She told me her and the other lab techs had a secret water tasting day where they tried tap water, DI water, and MilliQ water together. I was shocked that they did this and disappointed that I hadn’t been included, but not hurt, I didn’t work super closely with them so it wasn’t personal. Just more sad that I missed out. Anyway, Amy was still alive. So I knew then that I could do it too. She gave me a warning though - it will dry your mouth out horribly, so have a glass of normal water nearby for immediate use.

That sounded so odd to me, given that it’s pure water that I’d be drinking. Who would think it would dry out your mouth?

But now that I’d knew it wouldn’t kill me, that cemented the idea. When I quit, I will drink the MilliQ.

And today is my last day.

Bottoms up.

I emptied a small amount of it into a little paper cup. I was only going to drink a tiny amount because the severe mouth drying Amy described kind of scared me.

It tasted AMAZING.

Oh my god it was the best tasting water I ever had. I can’t even describe it. It really was better than all other water.

But then yes, the dry mouth started immediately after I swallowed. It felt like my mouth had become sand, or more like the fabric that towels are made out of. I think this might have been from the cells being ripped apart and then bunching up in clumps and coming apart from the tissue of my mouth. Normal water didn’t entirely perfectly fix it at first. I had the dry mouth for a good minute or two. It didn’t hurt, but it wasn’t comfortable.

What did hurt was my stomach. For quite a while actually. And this was from the tiniest ever sip. I would NOT recommend drinking more than that. You would probably throw up, and might really hurt your stomach.

Well, no rest for the people who are breaking lab rules in a significant way on their last day by eating lab supplies. It was time for me to taste the other thing on the menu - L broth.

What is L broth? Oh let me tell you.

L broth is this liquid used to grow large amounts of bacteria. Usually E. coli. Not pathogenic E. coli. Safe E. coli (might be hard to imagine, but there are many kinds of E. coli kind of like how there are many kinds of roses; only a couple kinds will hurt you). We grow E. coli to copy artificially made designer bits of DNA in a quick and easy way - you put it in one starter batch of E coli cells in a process called transformation (which can involve extremely high temperatures or electrocution, which is horrible now that I write it out), then you grow them in L broth. They multiply, copying the DNA into each new cell each time. You rip them open and yay! You now can separate out your artificial DNA. The more I write this out the more I feel genuinely bad for the E. coli.

Anyway, the L broth smells horrible when you first start working in labs. Like actually disgusting. Like plug your nose screw up your face disgusting. It’s made of amino acids (important nutrients that are good for things that want to grow), yeast extract, and salt, and maybe some other stuff. You put all these powders in deionized water and you get this frothy yellow amber liquid - L broth. It has this weird quality where some of the powders used to make it don’t dissolve well in water, so when you pour it into a new vessel sometimes it somehow creates little plumes of powder in the air as it pours and splashes and you smell it vividly as you inhale the little particles.

But, about a year into working in a lab, it happens to everyone. The day that you walk in, and suddenly L broth smells amazing. Amazing. A maz ing. It’s so confusing. They told me it would happen to me when I was making faces at 15, I didn’t believe them until it did. It’s been explained to me by others as maybe some sort of phenomenon where your brain realises you’ll be around this horrible smell for a while, so something changes in your mind and now it smells good. But it really, really does. It smells like the most umami almost chicken soup, but with more thickness and body to it. Like the umami grease fat flavour of McDonald’s fries but concentrated down into the purest most intense essence and extrapolated outward into a full bodied flavour profile. I wanted to chug it ever since that day.

(Oh and you want to know a secret? There’s this thing called SOC broth, it’s like L broth but for really damaged E. coli cells that need extra encouragement to recover. Once L broth smells good, that stuff smells like the true ambrosia of the gods. Somehow even better.)

Anyway, I wanted to drink this stuff. But you can’t because it’s against the rules! Right. So I waited patiently from that day when I was 16 to this day now at the age of 22. It’s been 6 years. I’ve waited long enough. Time to taste the promised sweet nectar of heaven.

I made a little batch up and put it in that little paper cup. I was so ready.

It was one of the worst things I have ever tasted in my entire life.

It tasted like rotten chicken soup, in the most twisted and sour way. It was bitter and sour in a way that was off, it was every shade of deep blue and sharp grey that food should not taste like. Because of the issue I described before of the powder not dissolving in the water all the way, little bursts of powder coated my tongue in this oil like layer that was impossible to remove. As I coughed and dry heaved, the powder was dispersed up into my sinuses. I could not stop dry heaving. I went to the water fountain to drink water and get the taste out of my mouth, but it persisted. After a couple washings it was less intense, but the powder persisted in my sinuses and I could still taste the essence of it on my tongue from the lingering scent. It lingered for hours. I could not stop dry heaving. It was horrible. Horrible horrible. It made me panic for a bit.

Do not drink L broth.

And thus ended my time as a scientist. I went out with a bang.

Part 21: Class Day

I quit in March, and commencement for graduation was in May. I had graduated the year before, but I was attending this year’s ceremony because last year’s didn’t happen due to COVID. It was the first time I was able to pick my own clothes for a major event, and I went all out. I had an image in my head of what I wanted to wear and I searched high and low for this dress. I found it in a dress shop in Brooklyn for over $700. I bought it. I got my roots done, the lady burned off a bunch of my hair, I had to have it fixed, that’s a whole other story. I made my own hair accessories. I got my nails done. I went to Zara and bought a dress for the Class day ceremony, which was separate from the commencement. 2 different days, 2 different looks! I planned what I would do with my hairstyle each day and woke up at 3am the days of to do it. I bought an entire arsenal of new makeup just for this. Every dream, every image, every fantasy I had in my head for how to express myself to be the most me and feel the most beautiful at this, I indulged. I treated myself the way I would treat a child on their very special day if I had one. It was incredibly healing. My abuser absolutely ruined my prom. But I got to have my graduation from Columbia.

I did my hair for the first day. It came out better than I could’ve imagined. I looked incredible. I left my apartment in my blue robes and white dress and a lady on the street stopped me to tell me congratulations. I caught the 1 train to the Columbia stop and as I got out, the train started to move creating a tunnel of wind that billowed my sky blue robes all around me, and the train conductor leaned out the window of the train to yell congratulations to me as it sped away. It was such a special day. I felt so beautiful.

I felt loved.

The class day ceremony made me cry. But not until the end, after I’d walked across the stage and shook everyone’s hand. Not until we’d all done it, and the dean of the undergraduate college announced us as the class of 2022 (which was my original projected graduation year before I did it early). Not until right after he said that, and the speakers surrounding us started to play “New York, New York” by Frank Sinatra. The song I had grown up listening to that made me want to come to New York in the first place. The song that sounded like the swanky starry skyscraper lights reflected in the rainy pavement of the streets at night, the horns of the taxis, the glamour of the traffic from everyone wanting to be in this place of happening at once. My dream. I did it. I just started absolutely sobbing my eyes out. The girl next to me asked if I was ok, kindly. I told her I just didn’t think I was going to make it to here a couple times, you know? I survived. I didn’t think I would make it.

Part 22: Commencement

The next day was commencement. I wore my $700 dress. I looked absolutely fabulous. I showed up to commencement technically late, just in the nick of time really (in classic me fashion). I’m always ten minutes late to everything. It’s just the way my brain is, I have a hard time prioritising elapsed time. I love it about myself. It’s one of my quirky faults. There’s a saying: first you love someone, then you love them despite their faults, then you love their faults. I love me, and I’m at the point where I love my faults (right now as I’m writing this. I wouldn’t say I was at that point back then).

I sat down in a pretty good seat, actually, and the most intense ceremonious series of events started happening. I didn’t know Columbia had a fancy silver gilded mace (staff thing, not pepper spray). I also had never seen so many people on campus at once. The entire central quad lawns were not visible because they were now just a sea of heads of observers. I did not like the president’s speech at all. Hillary Clinton showed up, which was a surprise.

It was a great experience. I proceeded to take myself to Brooklyn bridge park, my favourite place in the city, after lunch at one of my favourite restaurants. I popped into a liquor store and bought myself a mini bottle of champagne. I think it was around $40? Is that good? I don’t know. I sat down on the benches of Brooklyn promenade in my big fancy dress with my bottle of champagne and cried from how moved I was about making it to here and how optimistic I was about the fact that I am in the world and there is so much joy to be had. I am free. I then opened the bottle of champagne and immediately spilled it all over my dress. Which did not bring my mood down at all. Because really nothing could, and I had a dinner reservation at the fanciest restaurant in New York that I knew of at the time, that I had been dying to go to for months. One if by land, two if by sea. I’ll tell you that story later. It was everything it was cracked up to be, and is now one of my favourite restaurants of all time. It is also the place where I had the best cocktail I have ever had in my life (coup d’amour, if you ever go there).

Part 23: Beach

The summer that followed was the best of my life so far, and also complicated. I had a drinking problem. I had no friends, which is something I chose for myself, because I needed to show myself that I could be alone and that I did not *need* other people to be complete. It was the right thing to do. But it was hard in some ways.

The summer was wonderful though because I spent almost every day that was good for it going to the beach.

I have always loved the ocean. It feels like the most home I can be, to be next to it. I know that I am the ocean. That is what my soul is. I have seen it; that is a story for another time.

I have been like that for as long as I can remember. My abuser never let me go to the beach. Even if we were right next to it. Or if we did, it was to some sad beach in some industrial place.

I wanted to go to the real beach.

Now I could. And I did.

I didn’t go to Rockaway, that’s too close to the city. I wanted the real beach.

So I went to fire island. Specifically Robert Moses state park.

Fire island is one of the sandbar islands off the coast of Long Island. It is thin, it has room for only one road down its length, and when you stand in the middle of that road, you can see the sea on either side of you only a couple hundred feet away. On the open Atlantic Ocean facing side, there is this infinite beach that goes the length of the island, which is tens of miles long. It stretches into the horizon on either side of you, and is clear and turquoise and green and gentle yet humming with powerful waves. The water breathes in and out in undulating lines of coast that form divots and little lagoons that reach inwards sections of calmness in between sandbars full of colourful mini clams and crabs and fish that dart in between your feet as you wade in the warm water. The water is like a bathtub. The sun shines hot and bakes you in the sand. The sand is sparkly and white. Sometimes the tides hit in such a way that sand bars form not too far out, and if you swim to them, you can walk on them in the middle of the sea. Walking on water. I liked to lie on them as the sun set, painting me and the inches thin layer of water I waded in in golden light.

I spent all the time I could there. It became my most treasured routine. Skirt, bikini top, trader joes for snacks, chipotle bowl for the train, Penn station, LIRR to Babylon, s47 to Robert Moses state park. Uber home.

You’re not supposed to stay there after sunset. I didn’t care. I’d wait until the sun set fully and then go climb up the huge now abandoned lifeguard chair in the dark and listen to After Dark by Mr.Kitty in the dusk and blackness and mystery of the evening shroud upon the waves of the sea, the stars above. I’d climb down and drink sparkling blood orange juice from Italy while sitting in the tide, letting the water rush over me as I smiled and stared at the moon. I’d dance in the tumbling collapsed waves as they rolled over my ankles, lit only by the moonlight. I must’ve looked like a witch summoning magic. Maybe I was, in a way.

I’d call in my Ubers late. One time I couldn’t get one and my phone died. I felt stranded for a moment. I went to the huge parking lot to look for someone with a car that had a phone charger. It was maybe the first time I was truly “somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be”. I was a little scared, but so alive. I found a car with 2 teen sweethearts in it. The guy let me use his car charger and we had a conversation. He liked my dress. He was bi and was going to go to the pride parade in NYC for the first time. I stared at the stars above. So many. I could hear the ocean in the distance. He was nice. Our conversation was long. He called the lighthouse in the distance “the pencil”. It did look kind of like a pencil. I eventually got the uber and was able to go home. I loved to roll the windows down in these and feel the sea breeze, cool from the night yet still gentle, rush past me. I was never allowed to roll down windows growing up. My dad would hit me.

I’d catch the LIRR home in a sort of love daze coma of happiness. And feel the anxiety sink back into me as I reentered Manhattan. It became increasingly clear to me that I should move from Manhattan to the island, but I wasn’t sure how to go about it.

Part 24: Art and Changes

It was around this time that I started making things. Art films. I have always had videos in my head when I listen to music. Always. It was some time after midnight one night and I was listening to genesis by Grimes and staring at this deep blue light the fan in my room emitted. I wanted to dance in the blue light. So I lit up my iPad screen with the same colour and, using imovie to edit, made the most beautiful piece of art I had ever made up to that point in my life. As I was making it, I knew I was making something. And I kept it all to myself, I just left it in my computer and on my phone and watched it for my own enjoyment. It was something. Something just for me.

I kept making things. I did other crazy things in the city. I snuck into a parade and walked through miles of Manhattan in nothing but a bikini. I went to a huge warehouse rave in Brooklyn. I designed my own clothes and wore them to a New York fashion week show, and successfully snuck in as a VIP (I received the gift bag and everything!). But those are stories for another time.

It was in November after thanksgiving at carbone (which is still the best restaurant I’ve ever been to, and also a story for another time) that things started falling apart again. My neighbour was unhinged and threatening me with physical assault. I complained to the landlord company. They were useless. I declared the place unsafe and moved into a hotel downtown and withheld rent until the issue was fixed.

The hotel was called Ace Hotel and it was in one of my favourite areas of Manhattan, NoMAd. I felt freer leaving Inwood. I hated that place as a neighbourhood. The apartment was nice, but 2 people got shot outside. It was scary. I got sexually assaulted walking to the subway in the middle of the day and no one helped me. I don’t want to talk about that.

I moved into the Ace hotel, and I felt lighter and freer and more me, and also scared because I didn’t know what I was doing. But on the windows flaming the doors were these decals that said in big bold letters

Everything will be alright

It felt like a message from the universe. (And you know what? Input from future me: it was correct. Everything did go alright).

Part 25: Hotel Adventures

I loved staying there. I took good care of myself and did all my favourite things, like get gelato. I bought myself a video game I’d wanted to play since I was 12 and started it in the hotel bed. I was so happy. I had everything I’d wanted to keep in 2 suitcases with me. I planned on subletting my apartment and maybe moving to Long Island. I hired someone to clean it. She sent me videos, and that’s when I realised my landlord had stolen half of my furniture in the days I’d been gone.

Well, that was horribly violating, but also, alright. So I’m not meant to be there anymore. I decided to just let go of it and break the lease. Whatever. I went to Long Island and moved into a hotel in bay shore called the Ocean Bay House. It was a huge, absolutely huge, old New England-y mansion converted into a hotel. The staff were only there in the mornings to cook breakfast. It was furnished just like a wealthy person’s home. It felt like a house, it just had locks on the bedrooms because they were hotel rooms. And it was December, so I was the only one there because who goes to Bay shore in December?

So it was effectively my house.

There was a huge Christmas tree in the front room, and a rocking chair over a heating grate. I’d wear my big white dress and sit in the chair and let the heating poof up my skirt when it came on as I rocked, staring at the tree, wondering what I wanted to do next. I sang songs on the back porch with a cup of raspberry tea in the evening. My bed was absolutely huge, bigger than any bed I’d ever had or had been in in my life. The duvet smelled nice. The ladies who worked there really cared about me.

The place was near the dock for the fire island ferry, which still ran in the winter. I’d catch it on random days and joy ride it there and back. It was freezing, but I still wore heels and my white dress and stayed on the top deck, freezing and wind in my hair and smiling uncontrollably. One lady told me she loved my shoes. Another day, one of the people who drive the boat came out from the bridge and said “we don’t get a lot of people joy riding this time of year”

I told him I was moving to Switzerland. Because I was. While rocking and thinking about what I wanted, I decided I wanted to travel the world, and go back to Europe. And I’d seen a tiktok of Switzerland and it looked Christmas-y. And it was gonna be Christmas soon! So I was flying to Switzerland, and going to live there for a bit. Who knows where next.

I was laughing gold when I told him this. You know the type of golden sparkling laugh like honey when you’re just so happy. And full of a type of sort of love.

He said congratulations and smiled with me with a type of child joy. I think he thought I was something amazing. I probably was, because I was fiercely not typical. I stood out. The lady all in white, in a summer dress with white hair riding the top deck of the ferry in December. She’s moving to Switzerland. She has no plan. She’s so happy.

I traveled through Long Island just to see the whole place. I started in bayshore, then went to shelter island, to the Ram’s head inn. I happened to go on the exact evening the local highway maintenance team were having their annual Christmas party in the hotel bar. It was a room full of drunken middle aged long islanders from way out in the sticks. They kept calling me the bride because of my white dress (I mainly only wear white). I went to bed that night and could hear them singing “don’t stop believing” through the floor.

I went to greenport next to a place called the sound view, which was a rip off, but had an amazing view of the sound (makes sense). I saw snow on the beach, which I’d always wanted to see.

I then went to stony brook and stayed at a couple of hotels, one of which I ordered room service every night and ate my dessert in the hot tub alone. It was paradise.

I bought my one way plane ticket to Europe. A ticket to Milan and train ride to Switzerland was cheaper than to just Switzerland direct, so I did that. One way to Milan. I was ready to go. I travelled to Manhattan to go to the airport, and forgot my favourite dress at the hotel. Along with my birth certificate. The hotel lady said she’d keep it for me and mail it to me when I was settled.

I talked to a lady on the train about doing whatever you want.

I got to New York and went to buy a luggage tag. As I went in the store, my umbrella broke. This was David’s umbrella, and it was the last thing I’d had of him left. It broke right before I left the US. I left it in a trashcan in the store.

I guess I was meant to leave it behind.

A cop helped me with my bags into the train station to the airport. It was the one of the nicest interactions I’d had with the police ever. He laughed when I said oh you don’t have to and replied “well, we’re never going to see you again! It’s the least I can do.”

It was funny. The more I tried to hold onto staying there, the harder things were and the more pain I faced. But now that I was letting go, everything flowed. It was like the city as an entity was trying to lead me out and letting me go itself. I was meant to leave.

Part 26: The plane ride out of America

I got to the airport. I checked my bag. It was 71lbs. The bag people were shocked. “Where is it going?” One asked another. “Italy.”

The fee was $200.

Worth it. It contained everything I owned.

I sat in the terminal and waited. Screens played some sort of dramatised court show taking advantage of emotional people. I realised how much I truly hated this place. I never wanted to come here in the first place. I hated this place. I hate that they have shows like this. I miss England. I want to go home. And I am. I am going home to Europe.

The plane was delayed. Then delayed again. I made friends with the people in the terminal, who were excited for me when they heard my story.

I needed to make my carry on smaller, so I decided to leave my lab notebooks behind on a chair. Someone in the airport is going to be very confused finding those.

Finally we were boarding.

I’d always been terrified of planes. I white knuckle grip the armrests the whole time. I’m afraid the plane will fall out of the sky.

But not this time. Because I’m going home.

You know, it was the first time I was on a plane and I picked where it was taking me.

I think my fear of planes had been about my lack of control over where I’d end up. A plane took me to America, and that was the start of hell for me.

Now a plane was taking me across the sky through the gate of the clouds, across the sea to my home. Of course it won’t crash. I’m safe.

I fell asleep and woke up over the alps.

Part 27: Milan and Switzerland

The plane landed in Milan and I had no idea what I was doing now. I had about $1,500 left in my bank account and a couple credit cards I could max out a bit, but that was it. I also had the flu. And I didn’t speak Italian. So once I got to the hotel (which was very cheap for how fantastic it was) I started freaking out a bit about how I was going to be homeless in Italy and I don’t even speak Italian. I had a fever for days and I got my period. I spent Christmas in bed sweating and bleeding and worrying. I talked to a stranger on the phone in America. I could still make wifi calls and knew one good warmline. This man told me something like “I know how hard it is. But you can either experience the pain of change or the pain of staying the same.” That stayed with me.

I made a plan. I was going to Switzerland because that is what I promised myself. Then Paris, because I wanted to for years (the last time I was there I was 3). Then home. London. Where I was born and where I left all those years ago.

I took the train from Milan to Switzerland and it was the most beautiful train ride of my life. The alps start as a watercolour vision in the distance, and over the course of ten minutes, the train gets closer until suddenly you’re in them. Weaving through the mountains, darting by alpine lakes. It was early in the morning and steam was rising off the lakes such that the boats in them looked like they were floating on air the father away they were.

I eventually arrived in Sion, the cheapest place I could find in Switzerland to stay. It is the capitol of the Valais region, and a local alpine town place. No one speaks English. They only speak French. I speak French, so it was alright, but hard when you’re nervous. I have so many stories about this place, but I’ll just tell the main one. The place I booked was an AirBNB, I thought this meant it would be some building just for AirBNBing. No, it was an old lady’s generational home. It was so far up the side of the mountain, and it was a traditional chalet. She was a little bit of a hoarder. Her house was so lived in. Her name was Slavica and she cooked the best breakfast I’ve ever had. She was lovely. The room I was in was small and quaint, with a stock homegoods esque picture of the Brooklyn bridge on the wall, with a sort of watermark of a random models face in the corner and the word “fashion” printed in swirly script on the top. It was funny, knowing I just came from there. I didn’t have a window. Instead I had these big wooden doors held together by a metal latch. When I opened them, they let me out onto the chalet balcony. And opened into the most breathtaking view of the alps and the valley. I watched the sun rise over the alps every morning and drank tea. Over the days I watched the snow melt from the tops of the mountains.

Part 28: Paris

When it was time for me to go, I took a train from Sion to Geneva, and then the TGV (ultrafast train) from Geneva to Paris. While in Geneva I had some ridiculously overpriced fondue. Worth it though, must do if you’re in Switzerland.

I have infinite stories about Paris too, but those are for another time. I lived out every fancy fantasy I had. The Eiffel Tower glitters the last five minutes of every hour at night. It is the most beautiful thing. And so me. I loved that place. It was the city of serendipity. I wore my fanciest clothes. I got compliments from people in Paris on my clothes! I got lost in the city on purpose, because I can, because I speak French. That was how I ended up finding out about the secret alley concert. In the middle of nowhere on a wall was a poster that said “concert here 6pm” in French. So I decided to come back for it. At the end of this alley was an ancient little church I hadn’t noticed before. I went in and it was full of local French people. And hundreds of candles. But the lights were on, so while the candles were something, they didn’t have too much drama. This man came out and gave a very long academic speech in French about Chopin. Then he sat down at the piano, and all the lights went out at once. Illuminated by hundreds of candles, he played Chopin for 2 hours straight.

My favourite song by chopin is fantasie impromptu. He hadn’t played it all night, but then it was time for the encore. I whispered to myself from the front row fantasie impromptu”. And I knew, when he played the starting note, it was that song. And I was so excited I could not hold back a loudly whispered “YES!”. I was so so happy. It was the most Paris thing ever.

Part 29: Home

Then it was time to go back to London. I took the night bus from Paris to London. It was an incredibly long ride, the length of which I was bouncing in my seat because I was so excited to go home. At 5am the bus drove into a boat which was confusing to experience when you’re that tired. The boat was huge, and it took us across the English Channel. We had to leave the bus to go up to the passenger deck. I fell asleep on a table, lulled by the repetitive motion of the boat moving over the intense waves. They were huge. The whole boat would rise up and everything would tilt, then smack back down and you’d feel the reverberation of the impact. I loved it, I found it so relaxing.

We arrived in dover just as the sun was rising, and I saw the white cliffs. The bus took us up onto the land and as soon as I saw the rolling hills and sheep, I started to silently sob. On this bus. In front of tons of strangers. Just tears rolling down my cheeks. I was so happy to finally be home.

When we got to London, I booked a hotel and slept for 24 hours. I was finally back, and something in me that had been clenched for years just let go.

I enjoyed a week in London and then decided to go spend a month in Cornwall. I rented a house and had the calmest most wholesome little life in the countryside, having picnics every dinner and walking to the sea in the mornings.

Part 30: The coast path and the beginning of Incomplete Love Letters

But the month ended, and I had no money really and a million issues from the things I’d been through still. I still had PTSD, and I didn’t know how to make life open up to me. From walking to the Cornish sea cliffs so much, I’d learned about the coastal path. I looked it up and found out it was like the appalachian trail, it was 630 miles long and people hiked it.

I decided that was what I was going to do.

I’d put all my stuff in storage, use the last of my money to buy the gear, and just go with no plan.

If I did that, it was crazy enough that something interesting had to happen, right?

My life would start? (Because despite everything I’ve written, it still felt like it hadn’t started yet)

Yes. The answer was yes.

Somehow, yes. Oh life started. And that’s what this movie, incomplete love letters, is about.

The incredible, beautiful, serendipitous, magical, and entirely supernatural things that happened to me as I walked this walk, and the letters I wrote to them and art films I made about them as they took place.

Things happened.

And those things are the most beautiful and truly fascinating story I have to date.

My goal was to get to Lands end. I started in 2023 from Bude and made it to Newquay in May, then stayed for reasons that were entirely important and the right choice. Now in August of 2024 I’m finishing it, and as I go, I’m finishing my film about it.

So that I can tell you the story in all of it’s glory.

It’s one hell of a story.

But I need help.

I need the funds for the editing software, some equipment, and just the time to do it once I get to lands end and live the rest of the story. I need to be able to pay my expenses for a couple of months so that all I have to focus on is finishing this film.

My goal is £5,000 , but even half of that would be incredible help.

This movie is my dream. It is my magnum opus. If there is a song each soul gets to sing once that is the sound of their essence, mine is this.

Thank you for any and all help.