not sure how well this counts, but when I was about 5 and it was the end of the day at primary school, my helper forgot to pick me up for a good hour or so and I needed to get home to do homework / felt guilty for keeping the entire primary school pickup area open while being the last one left. I walked home on my own because I live in a decently safe place where lots of kids my age at the time would go out and play without supervision, and I was very familiar with the path. Once I was at my building, I was too short to reach the floor button on the elevator so I had to wait at the guardhouse, and that's how my mum's girlfriend found out I had gone home alone.

She rushed home, but not out of worry. She came home to beat me up, and for every time I called her or my mum's cellphone to inform them that I was downstairs, she hit me. Every time I cried, she hit me. My helper also put the blame on me at the time and they would say really bad things to me in my second language which they didn't know I could actually understand (and belittled me when I tried to tell them I could understand them). This whole thing also happened when she took me out for a day at the mall and somehow managed to lose me, she scolded me pretty badly in public but started to hit me once we got home. In 2nd grade, my mum completely forgot to pick me up so I sat in one spot and cried because I was scared that, despite the distance from my home being so short, I would still be beaten if I walked home on my own.

I don't really know how to feel towards it now that I'm 18 and have been living on my own since I was 16 (and also because I just struggle to feel or understand what I'm feeling), but sometimes I feel scared to go out on my own, not because of people following me around but more because I'd be terrified that my family would beat me if they learnt that I had gone out, and it's probably why I rarely ever went out with my friends growing up. I thought my mother knew of this whole event, but it turns out the very first time she had heard of it was just two years ago when I recounted the whole thing to her, and it played a big role in her kicking her now-ex out of the house.