Woman says she used a holiday as her escape plan — and days later police were texting because her family said she was a “vulnerable adult” who had disappeared
A Reddit poster said she had reached the point where leaving quietly felt safer than trying to announce she was done. In the original post, the 28-year-old described living with her 73-year-old Jehovah’s Witness mother while closeted, paying rent, handling half the housework, organizing meals, and still enduring long screaming spells, apocalyptic religious rants, and physical intimidation. She wrote that her mother had dragged her by the hair as an adult, punched her in the ribs during one confrontation, and physically blocked doors or taken her keys when she tried to do something her mother disliked. Even then, she kept minimizing it, writing that her mother was “just a deeply traumatised old lady” and asking whether it would be overreacting to go on a planned March holiday with her sister and simply never come back.
The post made clear why she thought a quiet exit was the only realistic option. She said one of her older sisters had married at 18, and their mother reacted by ranting that she had been abandoned and even turning up at the couple’s house late at night hammering on the door. The Reddit user also said her mother had a history of physically blocking exits and manhandling her if she tried to act independently, and she did not think she had the fight in her to push past her without risking escalation. Her siblings were mostly already no-contact or low-contact, which left her feeling like the last one still inside the house and the last one expected to absorb the fallout.
By the April 4 update, she had done exactly what commenters predicted: she left while on holiday and did not go back. But the peace did not arrive cleanly. She posted screenshots showing that after she texted her mother, “I think you’re right, I’m not happy. So I’ve decided to take your advice and find somewhere else to live,” her mother began sending increasingly frantic messages asking where she was, telling her to come home, and reminding her that all her clothes were still there. Roughly an hour later, she received a text from South Yorkshire Police asking her to use a link to start a chat.
The stranger part came next. In the screenshots she shared, one sister pressed for a forwarding address and offered to hold it without telling their mother. Another exchange showed a sister telling someone else that the poster was “technically a vulnerable adult” with learning difficulties and that their mother only wanted to make sure she was safe. When the Reddit user pushed back, another message told her the police had been contacted because of how “poorly” she handled leaving and because their mother believed someone may have taken her phone. Her reply was blunt enough to sum up the whole update: “I’m 28 years old.”
She also made clear that the move was not just about one bad argument. In the comments captured in the BORU thread, she said she was the youngest of eight siblings, that only one sister was still a practicing Jehovah’s Witness, and that some of the others were actually happy when she finally got out because they understood exactly what their mother was like. She wrote that she was safe, happy, and getting everything sorted, and said she hoped to go to trades college now that she did not have to worry about her mother exploding at the mere mention of it. The update did not read like someone wavering over whether she had been too harsh. It read like someone still trying to unlearn the idea that escape had to look polite to count.
The full Reddit update is in the BORU thread here.
Do you think the family really believed she needed protecting, or did calling police and pushing the “vulnerable adult” angle look more like one last attempt to pull her back?
