Weather 
When Brooklyn Beckham finally addressed the speculation around his estrangement from his family, announcing very plainly on social media that he does not want to reconcile with them, I felt my chest tighten in a way that was familiar. Not because I know him, or his parents, or the specific contours of his life—but because I recognized the tone. The restraint. The precision. The unmistakable sound of someone who has tried everything else.
His statement wasn’t dramatic or overly emotional: “I do not want to reconcile with my family,” he wrote in a Jan. 19 post shared to his Instagram Stories: “I’m not being controlled, I’m standing up for myself for the first time in my life.”
It was almost clinical. That’s what made it land. People who have never had to cut ties with their parents often expect rage or theatrics. What they miss is that by the time someone says a sentence like that out loud, the drama has long since burned off. What’s left is clarity.
I’ve lived in that clarity for several years now because I don’t talk to my family.
A traumatic childhood
I’ve kept that sentence tucked away for a long time, pulling it out only when necessary, bracing for the silence and awkwardness that follows it. People don’t usually know what to say next. They look for a polite off-ramp: distance, a falling out, a misunderstanding that went too far. I’ve learned to stop them.
It wasn’t a fight. It wasn’t politics. It wasn’t a phase.
It was emotional abuse — marked by control over money and autonomy, constant gaslighting and explosive rages that left me afraid to speak or exist freely. And cutting them off was the only way I survived.
Long before I had language for any of this, I had a feeling. As a kid, I would daydream about a life far away from my family (AKA far from the chaos, the volatility, the sense that I was constantly bracing for impact). I didn’t imagine luxury or success. I imagined quiet and what it would feel like finally being able to exhale.
A plan of escape
College was supposed to be my escape hatch. When I got into the University of Chicago on a full-ride scholarship in 2011, people congratulated me as if the story ended there. But I remember a pang of disappointment when I realized I was still in Illinois, the same state in which I had grown up. I had wanted to be gone-gone. I didn’t yet understand that distance isn’t measured in miles. It’s measured in autonomy.
Even being an hour and a half from home, my nervous system began to recalibrate. After freshman year, I stopped visiting as often. First it was skipping random weekends. Then staying on campus for Thanksgiving. After graduation, when I moved to D.C., I stopped going home altogether. I told myself it was adulthood, ambition, logistics.
The times I did go back, every visit followed the same script. My mother would find something—anything—to rage about. Arguments would escalate with a speed that now feels unreal. I’d leave shaking, hollowed out, ashamed. Eventually, I started paying attention to the contrast: how I felt when we were in contact versus how I felt when we weren’t. Distance felt like oxygen.
The final break
The breaking point came in November 2021, when my parents visited me in New York for the first time. Just months earlier, I’d been hospitalized for depression, alcoholism, and suicide attempts. I was desperate for care and for some sign that, despite everything, they might show up differently this time.
Instead, my mother arrived late and seemingly hungover. I remember the heaviness in my apartment that weekend, the way I kept glancing at the clock. When she finally walked in, she looked around my home like it was foreign. At one point, she said, flatly, that she regretted having kids.
Later, when I disclosed something traumatic I had experienced, my parents brushed it off as if I’d commented on the weather.
Something inside me went quiet. I realized I had been offering them chance after chance to love me, to protect me, to see me. They never would.
So I blocked them—one by one, and then all at once. After years of betrayals, I was done negotiating my own safety. I told my father I couldn’t speak to him after he dismissed what I told him. I told my sister I couldn’t have a relationship with her when she chose to move back in with our parents. She lives on her own now, but we still don’t speak.
There were no promises of forgiveness. No talk of reconciliation “someday.” I didn’t say the words people expect, the ones that soften the blow for everyone else. I chose honesty instead.
For years, I had confused endurance with strength. Therapy—especially EMDR—untangled that lie.
Facing criticism — and finding company
People love to say family is everything. They love to put mothers on pedestals. I had to unlearn the idea that survival meant staying.
That’s why watching Brooklyn Beckham speak resonated so deeply. Not that I know anything about what he experienced, beyond what he shared publicly. But because what I saw was someone who had reached the same conclusion I did: sometimes privacy is the cage. Sometimes clarity has to be public, because silence only protects the people who caused the harm.
Public sympathy almost always flows toward parents, tradition, and the stories we’re taught about unconditional love. When a child sets a boundary, especially an adult child, people rush to call it cruel or excessive. They imagine impulsivity where there is actually exhaustion.
When I shared my own no-contact decision publicly, the response was split. Some people were hostile and quick to assume I was ungrateful, dramatic, or simply at fault. Others reached out quietly, privately, to say: me too. Women told me their lives got better after cutting off toxic mothers. That having children later reaffirmed the decision. That they had never said these things out loud before.
I didn’t realize how many of us were out there.
Chosen family
Life without my family is quieter. That quiet took time to get used to. I used to talk to my mother multiple times a day. I used to talk to my sister constantly. There is grief in that absence, especially now as I plan my wedding. There’s no dress shopping with mom. No parents “giving me away.” But there’s also relief. I get to build a life with my fiancé, Zach, on our terms. Writing a different story feels honest. Empowering.
One of the hardest parts of being no contact is losing access to earlier versions of yourself. Childhood photos. Diaries. Drawings. Report cards. The small, ordinary artifacts that I could appreciate now more than ever. Knowing I’ll never see those things again still hurts.
I’m lucky that my future in-laws have welcomed me, again and again, over the last few years. Most recently, we spent the holidays together in Seattle—watching the “Harry Potter” movies back to back, cooking cozy meals, lingering at the table. There was no yelling. No lies.. Just calm. The kind I used to imagine as a child, without realizing it was something people actually got to have.
My upbringing has complicated my feelings about having children. I won’t have them until I’m ready. If I do, I know I’ll be a loving, respectful mother. I’m also at peace with the possibility that my story ends without kids.
What no contact gave me wasn’t perfection. It gave me space. Space to hear my own thoughts. Space to discover who I am without judgment. It gave me back my identity. My life is now full of love, friendship, travel, joy I once only imagined. I’m finally living for myself.
I hope Brooklyn Beckham gets to keep that clarity as he builds the life he deserves, free from the noise that shaped him. And to anyone standing on the brink of this decision, here’s what I wish someone had told me sooner: you are not broken. You can change your mind if you truly believe it’s wrong. But you deserve safety. You deserve peace.
Family, for me, is no longer defined by blood. It’s defined by who makes me feel safe—by who sees me and loves me as I am. That definition saved my life.
