Reade Saunders
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Survivor’s guilt is not some abstract post-traumatic affliction best quarantined in DSM footnotes. It is a structural response to a fundamental human experience: the proximity of death, coupled with the unbearable weight of continuing to exist. Non quia interfeci, sed quia superfui.Et hoc crimen nemo audivit, nisi ego. When you’re a child, and the one
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Some boys disappear into obedience. He didn’t. He just burned. They said sit down. He stood. They said blend in. He wore fire. Applause was safer than affection. A spotlight doesn’t flinch when you get too close. He learned to read a room like a script. Smile like a threat. Charm like a blade in
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He didn’t remember being sent away.He remembered the not-coming-back. The trunk shut. The room went quiet. A boy became a border. At age six, a child cannot conceptualise abandonment. Not yet. What they feel instead is dislocation—a wordless confusion about where home ends and why love must sometimes be scheduled. He was a weekly boarder.
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I thought your birth might fix me. You arrived with the smell of lemons still in my mouth, and something broken already in my chest. I told people you saved my life (and you did) but I never told them I was terrified I might ruin yours. Dennis was gone most weeks, and the walls
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He is no longer just a man. He is a diagram. An intersection of roles: Husband, Father, Stepfather, part-time Custodian, full-time Protector. (Son?) Keeper of calm, absorber of blame, receiver of news after the fact. He exists in margins— between court orders and weekend bag zips, between birthday cake and utility bills, between the memory
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He does not cry when the door closes. He has trained himself not to. That training began when he was six, when he wasn’t allowed to bring his Easter egg home. Now, at eight, he sits up straight in the back seat of Mum’s car, a Tesco bag rustling near his feet, a hand-drawn Sonic
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Betrayal in families rarely announces itself with drama. More often, it arrives quietly – through omission, reframed memories, strategic silences. It grows in the spaces between what was said and what was never allowed to be spoken. For the betrayed, it begins as confusion. Something doesn’t add up, a strange withdrawal, a coolness that lingers.
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The child is shaped first by absence. Not just of the father who left, but of the mother who remained – distant, distracted, or fractured. Absence wears many disguises: silence, busyness, emotional flatness, disassociation. Sometimes it smiles and says “You were wanted” while the eyes look somewhere far behind you. The father left early, perhaps
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A child is not born with a personality. He is born with a temperament, yes, but personality? That’s a slow accretion. It comes in layers, like sediment, each compacted by experience, repetition, and the small betrayals or affirmations of daily life. I didn’t understand this until I saw it from the other side – until
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There are adults who do not walk through life as whole persons, but as a gallery of selves—each one trying to make sense of the others, or deny them altogether. What the DSM once called Multiple Personality Disorder—now formally termed Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)—is not the theatrical split so often misunderstood in popular culture. It
Reade Saunders 