It’s been another full, nourishing week with my bestie and family — the kind filled with long, unhurried conversations that stretch late into the evening. We talked about school, teenagers, work, growing up, and the strange passage of time. About responsibilities that multiply, roles that shift, and the quiet weight of experience.

And yet, threaded through all of it was a comforting realisation: inwardly, we haven’t changed at all.

We are still the same people. The same values. The same instincts about kindness, fairness, loyalty, and truth. Life has tested us — sometimes brutally — but it hasn’t rewritten our core. If anything, it has clarified it. What mattered before still matters. What felt wrong then still feels wrong now. The compass hasn’t moved, even if the terrain has been rough.

There was laughter too. That familiar, grounding laughter that reminds you who you are when everything else has tried to blur the edges. A sense of continuity. Of coming home to yourself in the company of people who have known you across versions and seasons.

And then, inevitably, came the question.

The one everyone seems to ask sooner or later. The one that has echoed repeatedly over the past sixteen months:

“What the hell did you ever see in him?”

It’s a fair question — especially with hindsight doing what it does best. From the outside, with the ending already written, it can seem baffling. Almost obvious. As though the answer should be simple, or embarrassing, or self-incriminating.

But the truth is rarely that neat.

People don’t enter relationships seeing the ending. They enter them seeing possibility. Familiarity. Hope. The parts that mirror something tender or unresolved inside themselves. And sometimes what you see isn’t the person as they are, but who you believe they could be — if love, patience, or understanding were enough.

Understanding that doesn’t mean excusing anything. It doesn’t mean rewriting the past kindly when it wasn’t. It simply means acknowledging that choices are made in context, not in retrospect.

And perhaps the quietest strength of all is this:
I can hold compassion for who I was then, without doubting who I am now.