Kate Didd

Last year, I burned the ships. Not in a dramatic, romantic way but in the way you do when you are standing at the edge of yourself and you know that if you don’t jump, you won’t survive. I destroyed everything I thought I knew about my life. I gathered what I could carry with…

Editor’s Note (Trigger-Aware) This essay contains themes of self-defense, sexual violence, harassment, and systemic injustice. Details are intentionally non-graphic and written with care. Please read at your own pace, and step away if you need to. Your well-being matters. Due to everything unfolding in the media right now, it feels necessary, urgent, even to pause…

The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts. It sounds simple. Gentle, even. But for someone who once assumed the worst in people, that sentence became a mirror so clear it was unbearable. I saw myself reflected back, every fear, every assumption, every survival tactic dressed up as instinct. And instead…

At some point, the telling changes. The stories don’t hurt the way they used to, not because they weren’t real, but because they no longer live in my nervous system. They live on the page. They live in memory. They live in other people’s mouths, where they are often handled without care. My trauma has…

Emotional manipulation doesn’t arrive the way people imagine it does. It isn’t loud or obvious or cruel in a way that gives you permission to leave. It’s subtle. It’s warm. It tells you that you are loved while slowly teaching you not to trust yourself. It wraps harm in explanation and asks for your understanding…

Ah yes. “The phone goes both ways.” The emotional equivalent of saying “thoughts and prayers” while doing absolutely nothing. People love that line. It lets them outsource responsibility while sounding enlightened. Because apparently decades of silence can be neutralized with one casual reminder that phones… exist. What they forget to mention is that the phone…

An alarm goes off. Not a dramatic one. Not a cinematic one. Just a regular, rude little sound that says it’s time. I get up. Bathroom. Gym clothes. Same motions, every morning. Muscle memory, but deeper, like my body remembers before my mind does. I pack my little bag the way someone packs a life…

This isn’t a resolution. It’s the scene after the rain, the one where the sky is still gray, but the light has softened and everything smells like possibility. For a long time, I thought love had to be loud to be real. That if it wasn’t urgent or aching or on the verge of collapse,…

When I talk about my life, I want it to sound like a fairytale told by someone who has bled on every page and still chose wonder anyway. I want whimsy not because it’s cute, but because it is earned. Because joy tastes different when you have survived starvation of the soul. Because gratitude is…

The messages started coming in one by one, and I sat there in complete disbelief. The question kept repeating itself in different forms: How could someone I looked to for clarity, joy, and grounding suddenly be gone from this planet? I didn’t know him personally, not really. We existed in that modern, gentle orbit where…