It was 5 am, and we were standing on the balcony. He had me cornered against the edge. Above us, the sky was that beautiful electric blue that only exists just before sunrise. The kind that still gives you enough time to get lost in the night before the morning finds you. I can guarantee his view was glorious. Mine was him, being the sweetest he’d ever been.

Then he leaned in and said, “Do you know the first time I saw you? I had no idea who you were. You walked right past me.”

I laughed. And strangely enough, somewhere in the back of my mind, I think I remember that exact moment.

I vaguely remember hearing someone say, “You look really beautiful,” as I walked past them. I never turned around. I just kept walking. But from the corner of my eye, I must have caught a glimpse of a man whose face I would never remember.

Then he took my hand and tapped it against his chest to the rhythm of his heartbeat.

Da. Da. Da. Da.

“This,” he said, “is how your heart normally beats.”

Then he sped it up.

“Dadadadada.”

“And that’s what happened when I saw you.”

He said that in that moment, he forgot the world for a second and everything around him stood still.

It was the way he tried to put into words what he’d felt in a fleeting moment, not knowing whether we’d ever actually meet.

It was adorable.

Then he told me that from that moment on, he did everything he could to find out who I was.

To my hopelessly romantic ears, it sounded like something straight out of a movie.

The rest of dawn was history.

I would’ve fallen for him right then and there if I weren’t just a little more self-aware. But even my self-aware heart isn’t immune to reckless romance every now and then.

So I let it consume me.

Oh, but what made me sad was something so silly.

Her.

It had to be her. Or maybe that’s just where I’m destined to ache.

She had everything I didn’t. Your loyalty (I say that for dramatic effect because, let’s be real, you eventually cheated on her too). Your love. Your commitment. The life you built. The one I had once hoped you’d build with me.

She had everything I never did with you, and everything I never would.

I guess that’s why the single teardrop fell. It wasn’t just for what I lost. It was for everything I never got to have with you, and everything she did.

And I know I shouldn’t let it make me feel like I wasn’t enough. Believe me, I know that isn’t true. But God, there’s a nerve somewhere in my heart that still pinches whenever I think about it.

Why couldn’t it have been me?

But what can I say? Crying in a Benz is still better than crying alone in my room, where, back then, everything felt like utter doom.

It was like playing with fire.

I felt alive for the first time in a long time, like the parts of me that had been in deep hibernation had finally awakened with a sense of excitement and borderline limerence.

I couldn’t explain it anymore. My life was utter chaos, but the good kind. I had no sense of rest. One thing after another, busy had become a state of being rather than something that described my day. It never really ended. I was always moving, always getting ready, one event after the next, one recording after another. Girl truly was booked and busy.

And somehow, amidst all that chaos, in the middle of the rut I had quietly grown comfortable in, there I was.

Excited to play with fire.

I miss being able to write for leisure. There are always too many reports to write or too many scripts to learn and prepare for, pulling me away from the kind of reading and writing I once did simply because I loved it.

Sometimes, somewhere in between all of that, I miss myself.

I miss making time to do nothing. To have nothing to look forward to. To simply exist and get lost in my thoughts without tomorrow’s schedule or the day after hanging over me.

Life has been hectic. Although I’m deeply grateful, it sometimes makes me wonder whether I’m leaving parts of myself behind in the chaos of it all. And by chaos, I mean my work. I genuinely love what I do. The opportunities that brought me here are things I’ll always be grateful for. Yet, on some days, I find myself missing the girl who was probably nothing in the eyes of the world. The girl no one remembered, whose face no one recognised, whose name no one knew.

Just the other day, something a friend said stayed with me. I was in the middle of my own little crisis, replaying something I had said. It wasn’t something I truly meant, but it was something I had genuinely felt in that moment. I knew those feelings were unfair, and my reaction caught even me off guard. It may have disappointed the people who witnessed it. I felt awful about it, but I had no excuse. It simply happened.

I’ve been in regular therapy for years, and only a few months ago my therapist started spacing our sessions further apart, once a month, sometimes once every two months. That was a good thing. It meant I had made enough progress that I no longer needed weekly sessions. It felt like a personal milestone, a quiet badge of honour for all the work I’d put into healing.

But healing doesn’t erase your wounds. Every now and then, they still peek through, showing their scars.

That’s what happened. My friend said, “Well, they should know you’re not a fully okay person.” She didn’t mean it cruelly. What she meant was that the people close to me should know there are things I still struggle with. Hearing her say that also made me realise she’d quietly understood that about me all along. Maybe it even allowed her to extend me a little more grace. But there has never been any enabling, and that’s something I’m careful about too.

I remember something my therapist told me during one of our last sessions. I was caught in a moral tug-of-war, questioning whether what I was doing was right. It felt wrong, yet I was enjoying it. At the same time, the part of me that’s constantly wondering whether I’m a good person kept tormenting me for enjoying it at all. And yet I didn’t stop. Truthfully, much of the situation was out of my hands. All I could really do was sit back and let the universe unfold things as they were meant to.

After listening to me spiral for a while, he simply looked at me and said, “You spend too much time wondering whether you’re a good person.”

That sentence has stayed with me.

Maybe that’s a wound much older than I realise. One that came from spending so much of my life believing I was a bad person, even during the times I wasn’t. Maybe that’s why every mistake feels like evidence, every moral dilemma feels like a verdict, and every imperfect reaction sends me searching for proof that I’ve failed some invisible test of goodness.

Perhaps healing isn’t becoming someone who never questions themselves. Perhaps it’s learning that being a good person isn’t measured by never making mistakes, but by what you choose to do after you’ve made them.

What that whole dilemma reminded me of is that we’re all flawed. As much as I want to be, I’m not perfect either. But the thing is, the people who truly love you will see those flaws and still remember who you are beneath them. It also reminded me that no matter how healed I become, there will probably always be this chaotically woven thread within me that occasionally pulls on the wrong strings. I’m constantly torn.

Maybe that’s what healing really is. Not becoming someone who no longer struggles, but someone who recognises when they’re being pulled toward old patterns.

There was a time when everything I felt was either euphoria or complete devastation. There was no middle ground. Every emotion arrived at full volume, and it was exhausting. It took years of work to find somewhere in between, a place where I’m no longer constantly standing at either edge.

When I first started therapy around five years ago, I had one condition: I didn’t want to know my diagnosis. I was terrified that if I knew what it was, I’d use it to justify my behaviour. I worried I’d begin excusing every unhealthy reaction instead of taking responsibility for it. I didn’t trust myself enough not to become an eternal victim of my childhood, of the environment that left me vulnerable, gullible, and constantly searching for safety. Eventually, I was told that I have Borderline Personality Disorder, and that much of my emotional dysregulation stemmed from it.

Oddly enough, knowing didn’t make me feel broken. It made me feel understood.

It meant there wasn’t something inexplicably wrong with me. There was a reason. There was a name. There was something I could learn about instead of fear. Understanding it helped me understand myself. It gave me language for things I’d spent years trying to explain, and it gave me healthier, more structured ways of regulating emotions that had once completely consumed me.

But even now, it isn’t an excuse. Whatever is wrong with you should never become permission to hurt other people. That’s what accountability is for.

It’s there so we can recognise our patterns, own our mistakes, apologise when we need to, and continue doing the work. And even if some parts of us can never be fully fixed, we owe it to the people around us to make sure we don’t bleed our pain onto those who least deserve it.