I am really, really grateful to all my friends who haven’t asked what happened. So many people have just embraced me and told me they hope I’m okay and, without question, invited me to things and told me they love me and texted me “just because” and it kind of makes me want to cry with gratitude.

But the other day I caught my kids talking, and they said they knew exactly why their parents split up. BTS.

I was thinking, cheekily, of writing a post entitled “BTS broke up my marriage” – I’m sure it would go viral. But that’s not quite What Happened.

What Happened is this:

I was very young and determined to be everything someone else wanted, even at the expense of my own self.

I was very, very good at making everyone else feel loved and cared for, and told myself it really didn’t matter that there wasn’t anyone taking care of me or making sure I felt loved every day.

I thought I could make myself smaller and quieter and somehow, even though I was so, so burned out, find more corners of my heart to give and more energy to devote to others and somehow that would be sustainable.

I thought feeling guilty about spending time and money and energy on things I loved, even though it made other people unhappy or lost or lonely, was just how people lived, and I would have to make my peace with the crushing stigma of my secret passions.

Then I snapped.

I started to understand that no one is going to take care of myself but me.

I started to believe that what I wanted from my own life, these limited number of years I have left, was okay. Deserved, even.

I started to think that there were probably, given the mathematical odds, at least a handful of people out there who liked what I liked and tolerated with fondness the way I talk through movies and found my fun facts actually fun and didn’t mind how I like to collect toys and other childish things, and found it all very, very charming, and it was only a matter of finding them.

(Actually, it turned out I already knew many of them and had just forgotten.)

And by coincidence, around the same time, I rediscovered my love of music, and found BTS. And it was fun, in so many ways. And that led to a community of other fans who I now talk to many times a day that I love, wholly and completely. People who get me and let me be stupid and adventurous and silly and never, ever ask me to be anything other than 100% what I am, through and through.

And I remembered I had sisters, and old friends, and my writer gals who seriously, I owe so much to, and these people also wanted me to take all the time to find myself and care for myself as I needed.

So one day, I chose that love over everything else.

No regrets. I hope my kids understand that someday.

I’d love to go back to 20-year-old me and tell her all this but I know I wouldn’t listen. It had to be lived to be learned.

I’d love to tell every 20-year-old girl that she’s worthy and worthwhile and that loving yourself first is the only way you’ll find true happiness, but I know that’s not something that can be told, it has to be experienced.

I hope I live the rest of my days as an example to my kids of what a life can be when you live honestly and don’t try to hide. BTS or no BTS, find the things you love and love them, hard and completely, and don’t be ashamed.

I love all three of them so much, for exactly who they are, for all their quirks, for their deep thoughts, for their annoying habits, for their delightful senses of humour. I hope they find a dozen, a hundred, a thousand people who feel the same way about them, and I hope they settle for nothing less.

But if it takes them a few years and a few mistakes to get there, I’ll understand, and I’ll be there.

Thanks to all those who didn’t ask What Happened, but who I know will read this post with compassion and love. I love you all too.