I didn’t think at 39 I’d still be reckoning with the childhood traumas I collected surrounding a father that left, a mother that didn’t raise me, and a family that did - because, well, because they had no other choice.

I’m a feelings person. Big feelings. I’m also the person who learns the same lesson three or four times before the penny actually drops.

For about thirty minutes, I wasn’t anyone’s anything. Not an advisor, not a mother, not a wife, not a friend, not a granddaughter, not a niece, not the one who sees everything. Just a woman walking in the heat with a coffee in her hand, cute cats at her feet and the rare, strange sensation of listening to herself without anyone else’s noise in the way.

I genuinely don’t understand how people relax. Like, how do they turn their brains off? Mine is a perpetual to-do list, and no, it’s not just work stuff. It’s also the shows I need to watch, the movies I’m desperate to see, the albums I need to re-listen to from start to finish because I know I missed something the first time.

The body always knows. It shows up as that weird hollow feeling when a song comes on. The flinch when someone mentions their name. The dream you have sometimes where everything is still the way it was, and you wake up with a sadness you can’t quite place.

There’s something almost poetic about that, in a cruel sort of way. The universe handing us the same thread and watching what we each decide to weave. He made his identity a performance. I’m just living mine. If the scales needed balancing, I like to think I’m the good that came from it.

These shows might bring awareness of what toxic behaviours look like, sure. They’re a masterclass in manipulation, gaslighting, weaponised jealousy, and emotional unavailability dressed up as “protecting my heart.” You can learn a lot by watching someone else’s relationship fall apart in real time on national television.

When I was little and I’d hear other kids call out for their mums, it was sometimes a gut punch. Sharp and sudden. Other times just a low hum. But the low never left.

But almost nobody talks about what happens in the space between the rupture and the repair. What I call, the waiting room. The liminal zone where you’re not actively fighting anymore but you’re not okay yet either. Where the conflict is paused but your body doesn’t understand the difference between paused and abandoned.

I’ve learned that the cost of keeping someone’s secrets equals the belief that being kept is the same as being chosen. That living in someone's margins is the same as mattering. That if you fold yourself small enough, thin enough, quiet enough, you might finally fit inside someone's idea of love.

Here’s the story most of us have inherited: you fight, things get heated, a door gets slammed, something gets said that’s going to need an apology later. And then somehow you end up in bed together. And afterward everything feels softer. Closer. Better.

The friendship audit you didn’t ask for is also, eventually, the friendship audit that sets you free. Free from obligation masquerading as connection. Free from relationships built on who you used to be rather than who you’re becoming. Free from the exhausting work of maintaining friendships that no longer fit the shape of your actual life.

Remorse says I feel terrible.

Accountability says watch me.

You don’t wake up one morning and decide to outgrow yourself. It happens in increments so small you barely notice. A meeting that leaves you hollow instead of energised. A value statement you once championed that now sounds like corporate poetry: pretty, meaningless, designed to placate.

And the insidious thing is that this labour compounds. Because once you’ve established yourself as the person who doesn’t need anything, who can handle everything, who never makes things difficult, that becomes the baseline. That’s what people expect from you.

This year was hard.

Not hard in the way that you rise to, like a challenge. Hard in the way that it demolishes you in ways you never thought imaginable and you’re left staring at rubble in a mirror where you don’t even recognise yourself.

At least, that was my year.

For a film that promises love, actually, it sure doesn’t show us a whole lot of it. Now, before you come for me with pitchforks, I’ll have it known that I adore this movie. I’m especially a fan of Hugh Grant’s dancing scene (though let’s be honest, we all are). But that’s not the point of this piece.

Almost 39 years on this spinning rock and I’ve finally learned what the universe has been screaming at me since forever: you can’t resurrect the dead.

Fourteen years of sitting across from couples and individuals in various states of relational crisis has taught me that we’ve stretched the definition of infidelity so far it’s lost all shape, all meaning. We’ve taken something that once had boundaries - however imperfect, however patriarchally poisoned - and turned it into a catch-all for every uncomfortable feeling we’d rather not examine.