Every Version of You Requires a Death

There’s a version of you that cannot come into the next chapter.

People talk about growth as though it is all expansion and building blocks of additions to your life, your friends, your personality, your world. But reinvention begins with grief.

Grief for the old habits. The old coping mechanisms. The old relationships. The old rooms that felt safe and familiar - even when they were no longer allowing you to go where you’re trying to go. 

Every new version of you asks something to die.

Perhaps it’s the need to be chosen.

The need to explain yourself. 

Sometimes it’s the version of you who accepted less because you told yourself life was about connection, people, and better tolerance.

There is a confusing loneliness in becoming someone new. 

As if we expect it to feel like a montage from Rocky while we do the work to become someone we know we can be. 

You stop recognising yourself in places you didn’t think would ever feel unfamiliar.

You start craving depth where you once thought it existed, only to realise you are in complete absence of it.

And for a while, it can feel like you’ve lost everything. And becoming this new version might have been the wrong choice - yet you would never go back to where you’ve just come from, so you’re in this odd limbo of knowing you belong somewhere else but not yet being in that world. 

Maybe that’s what transformation really is.

Not becoming someone else.

Just shedding everything that was never truly you.