Yesterday, my heart ached and I couldn’t quite name the reason.

That strange, heavy ache that presses against your chest like grief you haven’t put words to yet. I tried to shake it off—life is full, the kids need me, there’s work to do—but the ache stayed.

Then this morning, I opened Facebook and saw a post from my friend Ali McCartney. She shared a story about a CEO at a Coldplay concert that’s been making the rounds—public infidelity, humiliation, viral headlines. And suddenly, the ache made sense.

I know this story.

Not the headlines. Not the celebrities. But the story. The real one—the one that lives in your bones when your life explodes, and you have to walk through the fire with no clear path out.

I am the daughter of a man whose affairs became public when his name—and the details—were splashed across the front page of our local newspaper. The day before I started sixth grade.

It was like a bomb went off in our family. Nothing was ever the same. That moment split my life into Before and After, and I’ve been navigating the rubble ever since.

I’ve been involved in a relationship that became a triangle—one I tried to justify at the time, because the situation was messy and blurred and the wife was part of the picture in ways that confused me. But it shook me to my core. I lost a friend, a man I truly loved, and worst of all, my grip on who I believed myself to be. It took years to forgive myself, to rebuild self-trust, and to feel worthy of love again.

I have also been the wife who was cheated on. The woman who watched her marriage unravel and had to carry the weight of keeping life “normal” for her children while her world was quietly falling apart.

There are no winners in these stories.

Just real people. With real pain. Trying to navigate choices and consequences and shame and heartbreak, often in isolation. And sometimes, under the unforgiving eye of the public.

So when I saw that post about the CEO and the Coldplay concert, my first thought was not about the scandal. It was about the woman. The wife. The bomb that just went off in her world. The groundlessness she must be feeling. The millions of eyes on her husband—and by extension, on her. The unbearable intimacy of public humiliation.

Please, let’s remember that she is human. That everyone in these stories—no matter how messy or morally complicated—is human. Hurting. Desperately in need of grace.

We are not entitled to someone else’s pain just because it makes headlines.

And maybe, just maybe, this story is calling us to look deeper. To notice the ways we all betray ourselves trying to be loved. The ways we disconnect from our own values to feel safe. The way we consume other people’s trauma like entertainment.

So if your heart aches too—if this story hits a little too close to home, or stirs up old wounds you thought had scarred over—I just want to say: you're not alone.

There is no shame in having lived through heartbreak, or in having made choices that you now grieve. There is no shame in having been all the roles in this tangled human drama: the betrayed, the betrayer, the bystander who doesn't know what to feel.

What matters is that we keep choosing to come home to ourselves. To grieve what we’ve lost, to tell the truth of what we’ve lived, and to find our way back to self-trust and self-love—even if it’s one shaky breath at a time.

To every woman who has had to rebuild her identity from rubble: I see you.

To every woman who has made mistakes she never thought she’d make: I love you.

To every woman who is waking up to her worth after years of forgetting it: keep going.

There is joy on the other side. Not in spite of the fire, but because we walked through it and let it shape us into women who rise rooted, radiant, and real.

Let’s be gentler with each other. Let’s be gentler with ourselves.