Standing back from my life and trying to understand it now doesn't mean I no longer have feelings about what happened.
I do.
My life was shaped for me long before I had the chance to decide what I wanted that life to be.
I grew up closely protected, following my twin, but I also grew up in the dark. Decisions were made around me and for me, while the knowledge I needed to understand myself remained out of reach. I learned how to live within the life that had been created around me rather than how to shape a life of my own.
Perhaps one of the hardest things about looking back is that, once you begin to see what happened more clearly, you also begin to see what was missing. I can see the independence I was never encouraged to develop, the questions I didn’t know to ask, and the choices I might have made had I been given the opportunity to make them for myself.
There is loss in that. There is grief, and there is anger too.
Understanding why those decisions were made does not remove their consequences. Compassion does not require me to minimise what those decisions cost me. I can understand the circumstances in which my life unfolded and still acknowledge their impact.
For much of my life, I wasn't making decisions. I was adapting. I was trying to function within circumstances I didn't know about and therefore couldn't understand.
And I became very good at adapting.
But adapting to a life is not the same as choosing it.
What I lost was something fundamental: the opportunity to know myself while I was actually living my life and, with that knowledge, the chance to decide what I wanted that life to be.
I accepted what was in front of me because it was what was expected of me. There was no place to stop and question whether the life I was living was the life I would have chosen.
I knew it wasn't.
Had things been different, I know I would have made some different choices.
The hardest part is that – being protected had not preserved another life for me somewhere, waiting until I was ready to live it. It had not kept my choices safe for later.
While I was being protected, time was still moving.
Opportunities were passing. A life was still taking shape around me and I settled into a different life. A life mapped out for me. Understanding arrived, but the years in which that understanding could have changed the direction of my life had already passed.
By the time I could see that clearly, it wasn't possible to simply step out of the life I had lived and begin again from the point where my own choices should have started.
I know I cannot reclaim those years. But what I can do is acknowledge what was lost.
It was not simply time. It was the chance to discover for myself what I might have chosen.
It should have been my time in the early years to find out who I was and what I wanted. I would have liked to travel while I was fit and well enough to do so. I would have wanted to make choices that may seem unimportant from a distance but matter enormously when they are your own.
I might have made mistakes. I might have changed my mind. I might have chosen one path only to discover it wasn't for me.
But I would have wanted the freedom to do that.
The freedom to discover what interested me, what mattered to me and what kind of life I wanted. The freedom to have some part in carving out that life rather than finding myself tied to one life.
That is what I mourn.
Not knowing what life I might have chosen, because I was never given the opportunity to find out.
For years, decisions were made about what I needed and what was best for me, and I lived with the consequences without fully understanding why.
There is no way of knowing who I might have become had things been different. I no longer need to imagine another version of myself in order to recognise what was missing.
I should have been given the chance to find out for myself.
My life should have belonged to me.
Writing my books have given me the space to understand what happened without pretending it didn't hurt. I can have compassion for the past without surrendering my right to speak about its consequences.
For a long time, I didn't have the knowledge or the words to do that.
I've had to build that life.
I have them now. I cannot go back and make those choices, but I can speak for my inner child and the young woman I became. I cannot return the years in which she might have discovered who she was, made mistakes, changed her mind and chosen again.
There is sadness in being able to say that now, because recognising what I needed does not make everything that came before it simple. Some truths can sit alongside love and understanding and still be painful to acknowledge.
But it is right that she has a voice now.
To say what she could not.
To say what it felt like for her.
And to say, finally, what should have been true from the beginning:
She should have had the opportunity to choose.
