Tonight, I rode in the pitch black.

My first proper night-time ride.

And I hadn’t planned it.

My teenager came home with a couple of his older friends and, somehow, I was the excited one.

“Can I go on my bike?”

Just for an hour.

There was something slightly ridiculous about the role reversal. When I say teenagers, we’re talking nearly 18. These are lads we’ve known for years, who my six-year-old absolutely worships and who have babysat her before.

So there I was, apparently the child of the household, while my teenager grabbed my earphones for me and I hurried into my bike jeans and threw on my leather jacket.

One of the lads had brought his girlfriend with him.

“I love your jacket,” she said. “It’s like a biker jacket.”

I laughed.

Hmm.

Yes.

Shock horror.

It is, in fact, a biker jacket.

And then I was gone.

Out of the house. Helmet on. Engine running. Into the dark.

We live rurally, so once you get away from the houses, darkness really is darkness. The roads disappear ahead of you except for the stretch illuminated by the bike.

But tonight there was the moon.

It was enormous.

Bright enough that I kept catching sight of it as the road twisted and opened up again, and for an hour it genuinely felt as though I was chasing it.

And my God, it was beautiful.

There is something about riding that clears my head in a way very little else can.

You can’t carry everything with you on a motorbike.

Your brain has to be where your body is.

The road.

The bend.

The gears.

The sound of the engine.

The cold air finding the tiny gaps in your clothes.

For once, there isn’t room for tomorrow, yesterday, paperwork, arguments, money, people, responsibilities or the thousand things constantly competing for space in my head.

There is just now.

For an hour, I chased the moon.

Then I came home.

My daughter had spent the evening with people she adores, making bracelets and generally having the time of her life.

Later, I watched a film with my 14-year-old.

Eventually everyone went to bed.

And now I’m sitting here with the moonlight coming through the window, thinking about how different life feels sometimes.

Not necessarily easier.

But different.

There are moments when I can actually see how far we’ve all come.

For a long time, home wasn’t synonymous with peace. Safety wasn’t something I could simply assume. My nervous system didn’t understand the concept of switching off because there was always something else to anticipate, manage or survive.

Now, increasingly, there are ordinary evenings.

Teenagers turning up.

A six-year-old making bracelets.

A film on the sofa.

Children sleeping safely upstairs.

And me disappearing for an hour because I fancied riding my motorbike under a ridiculously bright moon.

Ordinary things.

But after you’ve lived without peace, ordinary can feel extraordinary.

I’ve also learned something else.

People will come and go.

I don’t have the energy anymore for people who only appear when they want something from me, or relationships where I am valued primarily for what I can give, fix, carry or provide.

Peace changes your tolerance for that.

Once you’ve fought this hard to build a safe life, you become much more careful about who gets access to it.

And perhaps that is part of healing too.

Not becoming harder.

Just becoming more protective of the peace you’ve worked so hard to create.

Every time I get on that bike, I feel a little bit of it.

A sanctuary I haven’t felt in a very long time.

I’m not running away.

I’m not trying to disappear.

Sometimes I only get an hour. Sometimes it’s a short ride between everything else life demands of me.

But for those few miles, there is nothing to solve.

Just me.

Two wheels.

An open road.

And tonight, a moon so bright I couldn’t resist chasing it.

Then I get to turn around and ride home.

And perhaps that’s the biggest difference of all.

These days, I have somewhere safe to come back to.