My face hit the floor with a thud.

"Dammit, I need that for work" I thought.

Things had already not been going well. But they came to a head quite spectacularly one morning, when I stood up too fast upon waking, and fainted. I felt a bit odd as I opened the bathroom door, and I remember doing a bit of a juddery thing, then I landed on my face on the cold tiled bathroom floor. It was quite the commotion. My arm bounced off the loo seat and my knee whacked something, maybe the floor as well?

The noise was spectacular. It’s like when you have a bump in your car, and you can’t quite believe how loud it is when two bits of metal bang into each other. My head hitting the floor and my arm whacking the loo seat was the same – the noise! I lay there for a stunned moment. OK. This had happened. The second time in two months, and this time I knew I’d done some damage to myself.

My first thought was: “Dammit. Have I broken my face? I need my face for work.”

My husband had flung himself out of bed and was now standing over me. Thankfully his blood pressure is excellent, so he didn’t keel over on top of me. That would have been quite something.

I awkwardly rolled over. I was in the strangest position. If I’d died and they’d had to do the white outline thing you see in movies, it would have made a very odd shape. “What on earth was she doing?” the hardened female detective with a heart of gold would wonder out loud.

I was also naked, so I was very glad it was Nick who helped me sit up. He helped me to the loo; I still needed the wee that had got me out of bed in the first place. Then he helped me to bed. I looked at my face on my phone. My cheek had a massive egg-shaped lump, and my lips were swollen and purple underneath, where my teeth has smashed into them. My knee was throbbing. I felt weird. Matter of fact about it, almost detached, but also a bit teary.

I was supposed to be filming something that day, luckily from home on my phone for some brand work, so there was no studio to cancel, or people to let down. I texted apologetically to let them know what had happened and said I’d get it over to them next week, when the swelling had gone down. I lay there for a bit, then got up and put some laundry on and fed the dog. Life goes on.

A few days later I was due to speak at an International Women’s Day event in Hull. It meant getting the train there, and then standing in front of five hundred women with a deep purple shiner of a black eye and a swollen face. I couldn’t cancel because one hand I didn’t want to let them down, but mainly because it was a paid gig, and I needed the money. Don’t work, don’t get paid is what being freelance is all about. But what to do about the face? There was only so much that make up could hide, and I knew people would see it and make their own mind up about what had happened. That would be bad enough anyway, but while whispers in WhatsApp groups are one thing, in today’s weird world where strangers speculate publicly about things they know nothing about, it wouldn’t be long before the press picked up on it and I’d be fire-fighting all kinds of stuff. There is something about a woman with a bruised face that piques interest much more than a broken leg; and we all know what that something is.

So I decided to put a post out on socials to pre-empt it, saying what had happened, and that I was on a train heading to the other side of the country because I was going to be on stage the next day. I kept it light by putting some music by the Black Eyed Peas over the top of it, because that a) I had a black eye, and b) I’d spent the past few days with bags of frozen peas on my face. All fair enough, I thought.

It did what I hoped; people at the event knew why I was sporting a shiner, I made a joke about it, and the day went well.

A few nights later, I went to the theatre and bumped into some people I knew. They clearly hadn’t seen the post, and I could tell by the way their eyes kept glancing at my bruise and swelling that they were wondering what had happened. And yet they didn’t ask, which they obviously would have done if I’d arrived in a cast with crutches or with my arm in a sling. One woman, when I laughingly said: “Oh excuse the black eye, I fainted last week” stared at me intently and said: “Yes, I’d noticed that. How are things…?” When I said they were fine, I could see she didn’t believe me, and had already made her own decision about why I was at the theatre, with a bruised face and without my husband. It was awful. It didn’t feel caring and supportive, it felt judgy and scary.

When I said at the start of this that ‘things had already not been going well’, I meant it from the perspective of all kinds of things, but not that. I’d had a horrible start to the year with an emergency stay in hospital with pneumonia and sepsis, and things were pretty stressful at home because of, well, normal life stuff. But not that.

It shook me, the sideways looks that I got. In shops, on the tube, normal places where we barely make eye contact, but now I was getting double takes. It shook me because, well, if people assumed that I had been hit by my husband, which I hadn’t – then why were they making me feel bad about it?

I think it affected me more because I have experienced domestic abuse in previous relationships, but there were no bruises, no outward signs, so no one ever knew. I was able to walk around with the horrible, tight fear that being in a relationship like that brings, without the added pressure of people staring at me. Now I was feeling the judgement of misguided assumptions, and it weighed heavily.

What struck me the most was that the hurtful comments I received online about my face were from women. “Only one reason a woman gets a black eye like that… Just saying.” That kind of thing. Which I found bewildering. What were they hoping to achieve? Some traction perhaps, as people piled in to agree or disagree, and then they’d be part of a juicy online spat at my expense? Or were they simply, and thoughtlessly, Just Saying.

Why go public, if I can’t face the consequences, you might be wondering. The honest answer is, if I hadn’t had public work commitments where I’d be photographed by the press and be in a room with hundreds of people, being filmed on a stage and smiling for selfies, I would probably have kept it to myself. I normally work from home, and a few weeks of that would have meant that no one would have been any the wiser. But that wasn’t the case, and I am ‘known’. Of course I’m aware that I’m not exactly a Hollywood movie star, and we are all ‘known’ in some form or other; in our community, by people we work alongside, or other mums at the school gate. Not everyone can hide away until wounds heal; we all have to face the world in our own way.

Women get bruised faces for all sorts of reasons. And if you genuinely think that it may be for the worst reason of all, be supportive, helpful and most of all, be kind.

https://www.nationaldahelpline.org.uk/