She said, “you’ll be all right.”

But what she really meant was that she needed to believe I would survive without her, so she could leave.

I nodded as though her reassurance hadn't punched a void straight through me.

What she couldn’t understand is that something inside me didn’t just break. It vanished. And what vanished wasn’t just her. It was the life that had already started forming around us.

The truth is, I don’t want to be all right. I want the place inside myself that finally stopped bracing. I want the version of me that existed when belonging felt possible.

I move through the world imitating someone unbroken. I answer emails. I stand in line. I nod at strangers. But inside, everything is screaming.

There is a constant pressure in my chest, like something is trying to claw its way out. I can’t breathe deeply anymore. My body doesn’t remember how. The ache is so constant it feels like a second heartbeat.

I don’t miss her the way you miss a person. I miss her the way you miss oxygen. Like something essential was removed and now every breath is shallow, conscious, and incomplete.

I don’t know where to put myself. Every place feels wrong. Every room feels temporary. I sit down and immediately want to stand back up because nothing feels like it belongs to me anymore.

I didn’t lose a person. I lost the gravity her love provided, and now everything in me drifts, panicked, reaching for something that no longer pulls back.

My body keeps asking the same question my mind can’t answer: where is home?

This pain doesn’t come in waves that crash and recede. It just an endless swell that keeps building. Each moment adds more weight, more pressure, with no release. Just more and more and more.

I hold it together until I don’t. There are moments when my body collapses into the grief without warning. In the car. In the shower. Standing still with nowhere to go. I don’t plan it. It just happens.

There’s a hollowness underneath all of it. Not loud. Not sharp. Just empty. Like something fundamental was removed and nothing was put in its place.

I gave everything I had. I didn’t hide. I didn’t blame. I didn’t demand. I spoke the truth with my whole soul.  And the silence that followed didn’t just hurt. It erased.

I hate that the silence makes me doubt my own memory. Like the safest place I’ve ever known was never real enough to deserve a “goodbye.”

Silence is not neutral. Silence is a message your nervous system interprets as abandonment. It tells you that your pain has nowhere to land, nowhere it can be explained enough to rest.

I walk around carrying something unbearable, while everyone else keeps living like breathing is automatic. Like home is still a place you can return to.

I am not all right. I am not healing. I am just surviving minute to minute inside a body that no longer feels safe to inhabit.

This is not a breakup. This is the loss of the only place I ever truly felt safe.

And I don’t know how to build a life when the thing that made it finally feel livable is gone.

The hardest part of growth is realizing that the person you’ve been is no longer enough for the person you’re trying to become. There’s a kind of grief hidden in that awareness. You’re not only letting go of old habits or outdated thinking. You’re letting go of an identity that once felt familiar and safe. You begin to see that the version of yourself you relied on could only take you so far, and that truth can feel like a death of sorts.

You not only grieve the loss of who you were, but you also grieve the imagined future that version of you expected. Once awareness arrives, there is no returning to the old patterns without feeling the weight of their consequences. Growth forces you to hold a mirror up to yourself and see the contrast between who you were and who you now know you can be. That contrast is often painful, because it exposes gaps you didn’t know were there.

And then there’s the uncertainty. The not knowing what comes next. Growth doesn’t provide guarantees. It asks you to step forward without a map and trust that the discomfort is part of the evolution rather than a sign you’re on the wrong path. This is why so many people describe life as suffering. The suffering isn’t the pain itself. It’s the resistance to change, the desire to hold onto what’s slipping away, the fear of releasing identities that no longer fit.

But something happens once you stop resisting. You begin to recognize that growth isn’t about fixing who you were. It's letting go of that version and leaning into becoming someone capable of carrying a deeper, more honest life. The pain becomes a signal, not a punishment. It shows you where the old self ends and the new self begins.

In that way, growth is a kind of rebirth. Not dramatic, not overnight, but slow and deliberate. It requires courage to sit in the unknown, patience to let the process work on you, and compassion for the parts of yourself that are dying off. But on the other side is a life built with intention rather than repetition. A life shaped by who you are becoming rather than who you defaulted into being.

The pain doesn’t mean you’re broken, it means you’re in transition. And transitions always feel like losing something before they feel like becoming something.

The truth is that every ending offers a choice. You can let it harden you, or you can let it deepen you. You can cling to who you were, or you can step into who you are becoming. Growth asks you to participate in your own evolution, to meet yourself with honesty instead of avoidance, and to allow pain to be a teacher rather than an anchor. The other side of loss isn’t guaranteed peace or certainty. What it offers is the possibility of returning to your life with more clarity, more intention, and a version of yourself that was waiting to emerge. And that is its quiet gift.

We’ve all seen Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: food and shelter at the base, relationships somewhere in the middle, and “becoming your fullest self” at the top. On paper it makes sense, because if you were stranded on an island, survival would come first. But none of us live on islands. We're born into families, raised in groups, and sustained by communities. We didn’t stumble into existence alone; we were carried here by others. That’s where a paradox appears: Maslow was both right and wrong. His order works in isolation, but being human means we are never only individuals. At every moment we are both selves and members of groups, and the tension between the two never goes away. Sometimes we put ourselves first, sometimes we put the group first, but the real challenge is that we are always balancing both.

Culture, however, has leaned heavily into the individual side of the equation. The pyramid itself teaches us to see personal growth as higher than relationships, as if the individual were more important than the community. But that’s a distortion. Growth shouldn’t be thought of as outranking connection. A better way to see it is non-linear: the point of developing yourself is not to climb past relationships, but to cycle back to them with more depth. When we treat the pyramid like a straight staircase, people end up chasing improvement as if fulfillment will finally arrive at the “top.” But the higher you climb in isolation, the more you risk cutting yourself off from the very relationships that make life meaningful. That’s why so many overachievers grind endlessly, delay joy, and keep promising themselves that tomorrow they’ll feel complete. Yet tomorrow never comes.

If you need proof of how vital connection is, consider this: no one takes their life because they’ve missed a meal, but countless people have because they were lonely. Hunger may weaken the body, but loneliness starves the spirit. And what’s the point of reaching a peak if you sever the ties that give it meaning?

That’s a paradox we often overlook. We are never only individuals who sometimes come together, nor are we just members of groups who occasionally break away. We are both at once. The task isn’t to choose one or the other, but to move between them — sometimes tilting toward self, sometimes toward others, always finding rhythm in the tension. Growth matters, but not as a solitary summit. It is part of a cycle: self into community, community back into self. The pyramid itself suggests a straight-line ascent toward a pinnacle, but life rarely works that way. Growth doesn’t progress linearly, it moves in cycles. We return to the same themes of belonging, purpose, and joy again and again, each time at a deeper level. To confuse growth for a ladder is to miss how it really works: we rise by returning.

Where does that leave us? Well, the first step is awareness. We can only act differently once we recognize the paradox we’re living inside. Society tells us growth is about rising above, climbing higher than others, chasing meaning as if joy can wait. But nature reminds us that growth is cyclical, it's about bringing what we’ve gained back to the circle, and about refusing to sacrifice joy along the way. Becoming your fullest self isn’t a prize at the top of a pyramid. It’s the horizon we share, visible only when we walk toward it together.

We spend an enormous amount of energy trying to predict people. We analyze motives, rehash past actions, and play out scenarios in our heads, hoping to anticipate what someone will do next. It feels like preparation, but in reality it is misplaced focus. The truth is often simpler: people show us who they are through their actions. Trusting that reality frees us from the endless work of trying to decode them.

DMX once put it bluntly: “Always trust people to be themselves, and trust in the fact that you can see them well.” Maya Angelou echoed the same principle with different words: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Both cut through the fog of appearances and promises. People’s words may sound convincing, but their consistent patterns of behavior reveal the truth of their character.

I’ve seen this firsthand in my coaching practice. Clients will come to me with passion in their voices, swearing they’ll do whatever it takes to reach their goals. Yet week after week, the habits they need to practice — nutrition, movement, consistency — are left undone. Their actions tell the story far more clearly than their words. The same lesson showed up in my personal life. I once kept trying to reconcile the words of someone close to me with the reality of how she behaved. I thought if I just pointed out the contradictions, if I proved that her actions didn’t align with her public image, she would change. But that was my ego speaking — wanting to be right, wanting to control the outcome, wanting the satisfaction of exposing the inconsistency. In truth, I was blind to the obvious because I didn’t want to accept that her actions revealed her true self.

This is why we so often resist believing what’s right in front of us. Ego gets in the way. We want to prove someone wrong, to reveal them to the world, or to ourselves. Control plays a role too. We want to fix people, to mold them into the version we believe they should be. Sometimes even our hope blinds us. We want someone to live up to their words because it would be easier for us if they did. In all of these cases, we spend our energy entangled in their contradictions, when the simpler and saner path is to accept their behavior at face value.

Ignoring this principle comes at a cost. We waste time and energy building stories to explain motives, and the more we invest emotionally, the deeper the disappointment when words don’t match actions. The only way out is detachment: stepping back, observing clearly, and finding liberation in seeing things as they are. The Stoics understood this centuries ago. Epictetus advised listening like a stone — unmoved, unaffected by insult or deception. Marcus Aurelius described it as being the rock that waves crash over, standing firm as the sea rages around it. The lesson is the same: don’t get angry at the snake for biting, nor the politician for lying. That’s what they do. Don’t let misplaced trust break your peace. Observe, accept, and respond accordingly.

Of course, people can change, but true change is far rarer than most of us want to believe. Change is not proven in apologies or declarations of intent. It is proven only through consistent, sustained action over time. In fact, the only way to be fully certain is to look back over the arc of a life and see how it was lived until the end. Sometimes dramatic events — failed relationships, health scares, personal losses — can shift someone’s trajectory. But until those shifts show themselves in steady, lived-out behavior, change is only an idea, not a reality. To treat it otherwise is to set ourselves up for disappointment.

The wisdom here is patience and vigilance. Trust people to be who they are now. If they evolve, you’ll see it in the patterns of their actions. Do not become attached to their promises. Do not invest in their words. Remain steady, like the rock on the shore, unmoved by the waves.

Life simplifies when you stop trying to outthink people and just trust them to be themselves. Observe with clarity. Accept without ego. Adjust without anger. Free your energy from the drama of contradiction, and put it back into what you can actually control: your own actions, your own character.

Our goals are often not our own. They’re borrowed from the expectations we imagine society has for us. From childhood, we watch our parents, friends, mentors, and later celebrities or cultural icons striving toward something, and we quietly take note. When they achieve, we don’t just celebrate them, we often internalize their achievement as an implicit instruction: that is what I should want too.

The French philosopher René Girard named this phenomenon “mimetic desire.” His claim was simple but unsettling: we rarely want things in isolation. Instead, we want them because others around us desire them. Our goals become copies, echoes of what we see others reaching for.

As a personal trainer, I’ve seen this countless times. Clients walk in and tell me they want to look a certain way, lift a certain weight, or achieve a certain milestone. But when I ask the follow-up question — why? — their answers often fall flat. They’ll point vaguely to a celebrity physique, a friend’s progress, or even just say, “I don’t know, it just seems like what I should do.” Their vision of success is not born from their own reflection but borrowed from someone else’s story.

It’s tempting to assume some goals are universally desirable — health, wealth, status. And to some degree, that’s true. But even these broad categories are deeply personal in practice. Health might mean dropping twenty pounds for one person and building joint resilience for another. Wealth might mean erasing debt for one, accumulating assets for another. Status might mean recognition in one’s profession, while for another it’s simply being respected within their family or community. The numbers attached to each — body fat percentages, bank balances, titles — are unique, but we often don’t take the time to define them for ourselves.

Why? Because asking, What do I really want? is hard work. It forces us to confront uncertainty, to wrestle with questions that don’t have easy answers. Borrowing someone else’s goal spares us that burden. Mimicking the visible markers of success gives us the illusion of clarity. It feels safer to chase something already validated by the world than to sit in the discomfort of designing a vision from scratch.

And it’s not just about the thing itself. We also mirror what appears to bring admiration, respect, or attention. If someone is celebrated for their fitness, wealth, or achievements, we unconsciously conclude that having what they have will bring us the same reward. We rarely stop to ask whether their recognition comes from that attribute at all, or if it comes from something deeper, or even unrelated. Still, we latch onto the surface-level marker and pursue it, hoping to inherit the admiration attached to it.

The problem is that these borrowed goals rarely unfold as we expect. They look straightforward when observed from the outside, but the lived reality is messier. And when obstacles appear, as they always do, borrowed goals lack staying power. Resolve falters, because the desire was never truly ours to begin with. We abandon the pursuit and interpret it as failure. But how do you truly “fail” at something you didn’t authentically want in the first place?

Perhaps this is where failure needs rethinking. What feels like falling short is often just the unraveling of imitation. We follow someone else’s map, hoping it will lead us to the same destination, only to realize the terrain doesn’t match our steps. It’s not that we took the wrong turn, it’s that we were never meant to take their path at all.

This isn’t a tragedy; it’s an inflection point. We should follow others only until their path no longer makes sense for us. When the steps you’ve been copying stop lining up, when the trail disappears, when the “why” behind the goal no longer holds weight — that’s not failure. That’s the moment imitation ends and originality begins. That’s the signal you’ve stepped off the borrowed road and onto your own.