When I was little, I liked to stand in front of the mirror and look at myself: it was me, the whole of me.
Then I grew up and the mirror, at some point, became my enemy.
The whole of me had shattered, and all I saw were pieces of me, scattered as in a jigsaw puzzle where someone had amused themselves by losing the picture.
The pieces were so small that I no longer knew which one to start with.
It's hard to piece together the picture of someone you no longer know, and yet that someone was me, but I no longer recognised myself: so defenceless, so insecure that I no longer seemed like me.
He had played his cards well: he had shown himself to be an affectionate, sweet and caring lover, and that was enough for me to believe he would be a good husband and a good father.
After all, I had grown up in a family that had never flaunted great wealth, but I had certainly never gone to bed starved of love.
My father has always been an affectionate man, respectful towards all the women in the house. I have never confessed to him the violence I have suffered over these years, and frankly I don't know if I will ever manage to tell him.
I miss my country and I miss my parents, it's been years since I last went back to the land that saw me grow up.
There I lived my happy life: school, friends, dance.
I loved to dance: I felt free, secure, beautiful and happy.
Maybe that's why I've never been able to dance again, not even a few simple steps, because dance travels on the frequencies of the soul, on the waves of your own identity, and the years with him tore both of them away from me.
When I arrived at that B&B, I was still a little girl full of dreams and hopes. He meant everything to me, and I was genuinely in love with him.
Then the little girl became mother to her first child, but that joy was also kissed by the pain of learning that, sadly, my son was not as healthy as I would have wanted. Accepting the illness is painful for a mother and incomprehensible to a father.
Our son's condition and the money problems that were suffocating us led us, over the years, to move house often. Nowhere was home. We wandered like our souls, which were getting lost for different reasons. In those years our second child, a daughter, was born.
The caring man, meanwhile, had become violent towards me and my children.
He belittled me, he beat me for so-called reasons and for no reason at all. I tried every way I could to protect my children, but every extra day we spent with him only made things worse.
He was destroying my identity piece by piece, and our children were wrapped in a grip of suffering that was suffocating them.
I looked around me and all I saw were perfect families, and that only made me sink deep into guilt.
The problem with violence lies not only in the pain of suffering it at the hands of your tormentor, but also in the prejudice we feel against us every day, in the judgement of those who always find us in the wrong for some reason. This, together with everything else, contributes to tearing our identity to shreds and, sadly, when you lose yourself and lose your strength, it isn't so simple to think of leaving.
That question, which I hear most people repeat almost like a mantra, doesn't have such obvious answers when they strip you of yourself, when they turn you into a frog in winter.
But then, when all is lost, suddenly something happens.
One night I dreamt my name, and that name took me back to the carefree little girl I used to be, and I thought that if I wanted to see that me again, I could only do it by leaving.
I took my children and went to the police to report the man I had loved and who, over the years, had turned into my worst nightmare, my tormentor.
In the first weeks I had surges of guilt for faults that weren't mine.
At night there were nightmares, and it took me months before I could sleep peacefully without being afraid.
My children now have a normal life, made of routine, of schoolmates, of tears and of joy.
Of course they won't forget everything we have lived through, but there are days when we are out in the garden and I watch them laugh, and have fun as they play, wrapped in a ray of sunshine, and on their faces I see again the face of the little girl I was, and then I think that every life is worth living, that victims are not guilty people, only unlucky ones.
I think that one day maybe I will dance again but, in the meantime, at night in my bed, finally at peace, I dream my name.