Invisibly Torn

   When the news broke that King Charles had met with Prince Harry, Meghan, and their children, the reaction across Britain was swift and sharp. Disappointment. A sense of betrayal. The feeling that something important had been given away, that loyalty had not been honoured in the way loyalty deserves to be, that a monarch had stepped back when he should have held firm. It was not an unreasonable response from people who have watched Prince William and Princess Catherine give everything quietly and consistently, and who expected the institution to reflect that back. When you believe in something, when you have invested your sense of pride and identity in it, watching it appear to waver is genuinely painful. That pain deserves to be acknowledged before anything else.

   But I want to ask a question underneath that pain. Not to dismiss it, but to sit alongside it with something that might, perhaps, add another layer of understanding.

   Does it matter whether a defining role finds you before or after you know who you are?

   Queen Elizabeth became queen at twenty five. The crown did not interrupt a life already fully formed. It arrived early enough to grow into the architecture of her identity, woven in before she had fully become anyone else. This did not spare her pain. She was torn, privately and profoundly, between wife and queen, between mother and monarch, between the people she loved and the duty she carried. She made decisions that hurt those close to her and she bore that quietly for decades. She was not without feeling. She was a woman who always knew, without having to deliberate, which way she would turn when the conflict arose. Not because she chose it consciously each time, but because that hierarchy had been part of her since before she had language for it. The role and the self had grown together so long they were almost inseparable.

   King Charles arrived at the crown after a full, complicated, deeply personal life had already taken shape. A man with convictions, with a romantic history that cost him and others enormously, with a proven willingness to place the man before the king when something mattered enough to him personally. That is not weakness. It is biography. And biography does not dissolve when a crown is placed on a head.

   I know something about this from a very different place. Not as a monarch, but as someone who spent twenty years in a role that was chosen for her before she had the chance to choose for herself. Medicine found me early, through good marks and family expectation and a culture that places enormous weight on certain paths. I gave it everything, including the frontline of a pandemic that asked the last of what I had. But it was never mine in the way that matters most. Psychology I found late, and I fought for it the way you fight for something that truly belongs to you, attending university during the day while working night shifts, pregnant, married, walking against every expectation that told me I was choosing something lesser. When I finally resigned from medicine completely, everyone who loved me was afraid. I had chosen passion over stability, vocation over status.

   In therapy I do not feel I am working. I am simply being myself.

   I share this not to place my story alongside those of kings and queens, but because I think this experience, of living inside a role that was assigned versus finally inhabiting one that was chosen, is something many people recognise. The career reconsidered at forty. The path abandoned after decades. The quiet grief of realising that what you built your life around was never quite yours. And the strange, hard won peace of arriving, finally, at something true.

   King Charles has spent his life knowing the difference between those two feelings. He is a man who already knew, long before the crown arrived, what it felt like to choose something personal over something institutional. That history does not disappear. Which is perhaps why, when his son appeared at the furthest distance, something in him moved before the king could hold it back.

   I also find myself wondering, and this is offered gently, whether a man who carries some weight about what his earlier choices cost his children when they were young might find it very hard to risk repeating that distance. Guilt, when it is honest, can be a powerful motor. Not always toward the right decision. But always toward the most human one.

   And this is where I want to pause, and ask the British public, with genuine respect for everything they feel, to allow one more image into the picture. Before the king, there is a grandfather. A man for whom, despite everything that has passed, that child is still his child, and those grandchildren are still his grandchildren. In my culture we say that grandchildren are loved even more fiercely than children themselves. That does not make his decision right. It does not make the disappointment less valid. But it makes it human. And perhaps understanding what made it human is not the same as excusing it.

   There is something else I want to name carefully. Prince William's position in all of this moves me perhaps most of all. He has given consistently and quietly, devoted himself alongside Princess Catherine to something that asks everything of them both. Quiet devotion is so often taken for granted, by institutions and by families alike. A parent caught between two children in conflict is one of the most painful human positions there is. Not right or wrong. Simply human. And the child who stays sometimes bears a cost that nobody thinks to acknowledge.

   There are people in this story I want to honour, not as public figures but as human beings carrying things the rest of us rarely stop to imagine.

   I want to honour every woman like Queen Elizabeth, women who have spent their lives torn between who they are and what life asked of them, seeking a balance that was probably never fully reachable, giving everything to roles that claimed them before they could choose, and carrying that quietly, with a dignity that the world often mistook for coldness, or for weakness.

   I want to honour every man like King Charles, men whose inner battles remain hidden, who are judged for their decisions without anyone taking the time to ask what those decisions cost them, or what old guilt quietly shaped them.

   I want to honour Prince William for a devotion that continues away from the noise. And I want to honour Prince Harry, because no story has only one side, and no person is only what we see from the outside.

   None of us can know what any of them truly carry. Only they know that. Only God knows what sits beneath the decisions that the rest of us are so quick to judge.

   What we can choose is whether we meet people with that judgment, or with the kind of understanding that asks, before anything else, what it cost you to become who you are.

   That question belongs to all of us...

This piece reflects personal and clinical observations based entirely on public information. It is not intended as a clinical assessment of any individual.

© Dr. Saoussen Chebaiki (Sue), July 2026. All rights reserved. This article may not be reproduced without the author's written permission.