Build The Ladder

Have you ever seen the show Maid?

It’s a few years old now,

I can’t even remember what platform it was streaming on

but it stayed with me.

It’s the story of a young mother who runs away

from her abusive husband with her little girl,

desperate to build a better life for them both.

She’s uneducated, broke, and terrified —

but she’s determined.

And then reality sets in.

She can’t get a job without a permanent address.

She can’t get housing without a job.

She ends up in a domestic violence shelter,

then a transitional unit,

navigating an endless maze of systems

that seem designed to break the spirit.

Eventually, she lands a job cleaning houses —

scrubbing away other people’s messes

while trying to hold her own life together.

And just when you think she’s going to make it…

she goes back.

Back to the man who broke her.

Back to the cycle she fought so hard to escape.

I remember watching that part and crying inside for her.

Because I know that life.

I have never been hit, thank God.

But I have been emotionally and psychologically abused — more than once.

And I know what it’s like to go back.

To confuse the chaos for love.

To mistake hope for healing.

To keep believing that this time will be different,

that he will be different,

that I will be enough to make it work.

There’s a scene in Maid that I can’t forget.

The main character is lying at the bottom of a deep hole in the forest —

literally and metaphorically trapped.

She looks up at the light filtering through the trees,

and you can feel it —

that moment when you realize no one is coming to save you.

That’s the moment.

The one that breaks you open.

The one that forces you to build your own ladder.

Because no one builds it for you.

No one rescues you from the hole.

You build it — rung by rung —

with every act of self-respect,

every boundary you set,

every truth you finally speak out loud.

You build it with therapy,

with tears,

with new beliefs and habits,

with quiet mornings when you decide to keep going.

You build it by choosing peace over potential.

By choosing yourself — again and again —

even when it hurts.

And one day,

you climb high enough to feel the sunlight again.

Not because the world got easier,

but because you did the hardest thing:

You stopped waiting to be saved.

You built the ladder.

That’s what I’ve been doing for months now —

building, climbing, healing,

finding my rhythm again.

Sometimes,

something still knocks the wind out of me —

a memory, a moment, a 90-minute trigger —

and I slip a few rungs.

But I no longer live at the bottom of the hole.

I live in the climb.

In the stretch of muscle and will.

In the sunlight that touches my face

a little longer each day.

I have built this ladder

with my own two hands.

And I am almost out.