Sam Bailey

My Mom is the strongest woman I ever knew. When I was 11, my dad left us for the woman next door. He walked away and left my mom with three boys. We were 11, 9, and 4… and everything fell apart. Then the bank came saying the house had a secret loan. My mom didn’t even know the debt existed. Back then, a divorced woman could not get credit. People expected her to give up and live on welfare. But she went to the bank and begged for one chance. She worked in a factory day and night to save our home. She paid a 30-year mortgage in only 6 years. She raised three boys, grew food, cooked, and never quit. She made sure we had school, food, and a future. This photo is her with my sons… the family she fought for. I miss her every day, and I can never repay her love. This needs to go viral! ❤️

Let’s fucking talk about it. Gaslighting is violence, and I’m beyond done pretending it’s not just because some people get uncomfortable when it’s named out loud. Discomfort is the whole point. Comfort is how this shit keeps getting excused. Gaslighting is someone fucking with your head so consistently that you start apologizing for existing. It’s being told you’re wrong, crazy, dramatic, sensitive, unstable—over and over—until your own thoughts don’t feel like yours anymore. Until you hesitate before speaking. Until you check your tone, your memory, your reactions, your sanity. That’s not a disagreement. That’s psychological assault. It’s waking up already doubting yourself. It’s replaying conversations at 3 a.m. trying to find the moment you “misheard” something that was said loud and clear. It’s needing proof for your own memories. It’s learning to shut the fuck up because speaking only gets you twisted into the villain. That kind of damage doesn’t happen accidentally. And no, this doesn’t just hurt feelings. It rewires your brain. Gaslighting trains your nervous system to believe trusting yourself is dangerous. That clarity will be punished. That certainty will be mocked. It teaches you to freeze, fawn, over-explain, and second-guess every goddamn instinct you have. Then the same people who did that look at you and ask why you’re anxious. Why you can’t make decisions. Why you’re angry. Why you don’t trust yourself. Are you fucking serious? You don’t get to dismantle someone’s reality piece by piece and then act confused when they’re wrecked. You don’t get to erase truth and then label the fallout “mental illness.” You don’t get to destroy someone quietly and then demand they be calm, polite, and reasonable about it. Gaslighting is control without bruises. It’s domination without witnesses. It’s violence for people who want clean hands and plausible deniability. So no, I’m not softening the language. I’m not calling it “emotional stuff.” I’m not watering it down so people who’ve never lived it can stay comfortable. If you survived gaslighting and now question yourself more than anyone else ever questioned you, that’s not weakness. That’s damage. Real damage. And if calling it violence pisses you off? Good. That means it finally fucking landed.

There's a kind of missing so deep it takes your breath away. ~ Sending love to anyone missing someone this holiday season...

My wish would be for every child to have this. That little sigh when she let all her worries go and relaxed into dreamland!❤️

🌟 Animal Welfare Hero 🌟 How many RTs can today’s animal welfare hero get? @NiallHarbison and his wonderful team feeds, rescues and rehomes thousands of dogs in Thailand every year. Niall, you deserve a massive THANK YOU for caring 🙏.

The cruelest wounds come wrapped in full awareness. when someone maps your vulnerabilities with surgical precision and then presses exactly where it hurts most, transforming intimacy into weaponry with the cold efficiency of a practiced assassin. There's something uniquely devastating about realizing you weren't destroyed by accident but by design, that your pain was someone else's calculated choice, reducing your humanity to collateral damage in their personal war. The hardest pill to swallow isn't that people can be cruel, but that they can be cruel while looking you in the eye, choosing to hurt you not in the heat of passion but in the cold light of deliberate intent.

@ellielexx I read your posts with such visceral pain in my heart for you and for Billy. You write so powerfully about your horrendous experience. I wish for you only the best of things for the future, and that you and Billy do meet again at some point. ❤️

It’s #BrainTumourAwarenessMonth, and this time last year, my little boy was dying, and there was nobody and nothing that could help him. DIPG is the worst cancer diagnosis there is. Please help us make a change in Billy’s name: justgiving.com/page/billysbat…

Dearest Billy, Day 130. How many more "I love you's" will I hear? A year on, I'm not even sure. We had 12 days left, so it wasn't many. You could barely speak, and you'd lost so much of your mobility. You could no longer walk or sit yourself up in bed. 🧵

Wrong is wrong even if everyone is doing it. Right is right even if no one is doing it.

If you're feeling burned out by the end of the week, It's not just because of hours worked. In reality, the roots of burnout run much deeper. Leaders must learn to recognize when it's happening, And work to make things better before it's too late:

@Chrissietutoruk 💯. Women are sometimes treated appallingly in education… sometimes by other women too. Bullies should be called out . It takes a brave women to make a stand. Enough is enough . 💪

C.S. Lewis said,“You can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” I wish Amanda Spielman would have the good grace to either concede she was wrong or bow out of the discussion gracefully. Trying to rewrite history is a bad look…

Parents, take your kids to all those birthday parties. Here's why. Once upon a time, a million years ago, in a San Fernando Valley far, far away, my mother had a birthday party and nobody showed. Not a single kid. With school starting, I wanted to share the story. A thread 🧵

@RE_McGEE Stunning garden - love it. 😍 Best of luck tomorrow - hope they can bring you some respite from the agonising worry.

I have been very unwell for about a week with no sign of me getting better, we are a bit worried. To stop my mind spiralling I did my first hour of well-being gardening this evening and feel so much better for it.

When Meryl Streep talks, you can hear a pin drop.

my workplace has a "wellness" room and it's just this weirdly long room that obviously used to be a storage space that looks like this

😌

A male Pheasant is trying to impress her but she is not impressed! 😂