At 4.30 one morning last week, while I was asleep, strangers were downstairs inside my home.
They took treasured jewellery. Car keys. My car. Small electricals and other things that can be replaced, technically speaking. But emotionally, it doesn’t feel technical at all.
What surprised me most wasn’t panic. It wasn’t even tears. It was numbness. A hollowed-out feeling that sat in my chest like air where something solid used to be. I drank water. I momentarily thought it was an REM dream. I spoke to four police officers who came to my home as the sun came up. I answered their questions. I kept functioning. But inside, something shifted. Because being robbed isn’t just about losing “stuff”. It’s about having your sense of safety peeled away without warning.
Your home is supposed to be the one place where you drop your shoulders. Where you move around unedited and barefoot. Where you don’t have to be alert. When someone breaks into that space, they don’t just take objects, they take certainty. They take the quiet assumption that you’re safe while you sleep.
My dog Scout was barking furiously at 4.30am. She was downstairs. She saw him/them/they/her. I keep thinking about that and her strong but tiny body standing guard while I slept, unaware. Brave and helpless all at once. That detail keeps replaying in my mind, along with the endless carousel of “what ifs”.
What if I’d gone downstairs? What if I’d surprised them? What if they’d been armed? What if today looked very different?
There’s a strange guilt that creeps in too, the kind that tells you to be grateful instead of upset. At least we weren’t hurt. At least it could have been worse. All true. And also beside the point.
You’re allowed to feel violated even when you “got lucky”. You’re allowed to be angry that someone felt entitled to enter your life and take what wasn’t theirs. You’re allowed to grieve sentimental objects because they represented time, memory, milestones. That jewellery wasn’t just metal. It was history. It was bloody effort. It was stuff I loved and bought because of hard-earned work.
According to the Bureau Of Crime Statistics And Research, national police-recorded home invasions had a slight increase in 2023–24 compared with 2022–23. While not hugely significant … but the stats are there.
If the emotional impact isn’t enough, enter the damn admin. The paperwork. The insurance claims. The police reports. The forensics team. The back and forth (via email) to the police. The endless retelling of what happened over and over again to strangers who need timelines and serial numbers while you’re still trying to process an unhealthy amount of melancholy.
There was CCTV footage to find. Community groups to post in. Neighbours to ask. Messages to send. Forms to fill out. Receipts to find. Details to recall you hadn’t thought about in years. You’re expected to become organised and articulate at the exact moment your nervous system is fried.
It’s exhausting. And oddly dehumanising. Your trauma gets translated into reference numbers, case IDs and claim forms. It oscillates between being deeply emotional and strangely transactional, discussing loss in the language of policies and procedures.
There’s also something deeply unsettling about the casualness of it all. The efficiency. The quiet. The fact that while you were sleeping someone else was opportunistic and calculating.
And still – somehow – life keeps moving. Meals gets made. Emails get answered. My brilliant community of neighbours, my family and friends check in to see how I’m going. The dog gets walked. The sun comes up. Work life continues. You exist inside the contradiction of still being shaken and acting functional at the same time.
I know I’ll cry soon. Everyone says that part always arrives late. Shock has a way of holding things back until your body decides it’s safe enough to feel it.
For now, I’m sitting with gratitude that I didn’t meet them face-to-face on the stairs. That my story didn’t turn into something darker. That my dog barked. That I’m here to write this. But I won’t pretend this was “just stuff”. Because it wasn’t.
It was a breach. A violation. A reminder that safety is fragile and that rebuilding trust in your own space takes time.
If you’ve ever been through this – and many of us have – you’ll understand: it’s not the theft that stays with you. It’s the feeling of having your little sanctuary disturbed.
So, I’m choosing to be gentle with myself, just like anyone and everyone who has been through something like this. Sure, it’s not the end of the world, but trauma doesn’t always arrive with tears. Sometimes it arrives with silence, but that doesn’t make it smaller.
Melissa Hoyer is a cultural and social commentator.
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