Growing pains —
and the art of letting go.

Lord knows I have outgrown so many places. So many jobs, relationships, and friendships — and that last one is the one that sits heaviest, because the math on my friendships has always been uncomfortably simple. I can count the people I would truly call friends on one hand. And if I am being honest — genuinely, unflinchingly honest — we don't even need the whole hand. Two fingers, perhaps. And even that might be a generous exaggeration. Let's call it one. My trusty, old faithful. The one who has outlasted every version of me.

That number does not embarrass me anymore. It used to. But I have come to understand that a small circle is not a sign of failure — it is often a sign of discernment so sharp it cuts before you even realize it is working.

Because here is the thing about me: I have always been extraordinarily, almost uncomfortably, aware of the relationships and spaces that were no longer serving me — while still being in them. While still showing up. While being fully present in the room, I could feel something in me quietly noting: this is coming to an end. Whether it was the sense that I had absorbed everything a place or person had to offer me. Whether I had learned the lessons, witnessed the beauty, and given what I came to give. Or whether I simply felt the slow, creeping arrival of comfort — and to me, comfort has always carried the faint smell of stagnation.

The moment comfort begins to feel like a ceiling.

The moment something becomes familiar — truly, deeply familiar — something in me starts to quietly pack its bags. I know how that sounds. I know it reads, on the surface, as self-centered. As though the very instant a person or a place stops actively feeding you, you simply cut all ties and move on, leaving behind whatever no longer aligns with your current chapter. And I will not pretend there is no truth in that. When something is no longer nourishing me, I feel it. When it is no longer aligned with who I am becoming, I feel it. And I have historically not waited very long before I act on that feeling.

For a long time I blamed it on my Gemini moon — that hunger for stimulation, that near-allergic reaction to routine. When something becomes predictable, it becomes invisible to me. And when it becomes invisible, I mistake it for stagnation. I have always equated familiarity with standing still, and standing still has always felt, to me, like a kind of quiet surrender.

But then, slowly, a different kind of understanding.

I am learning something now — slowly, imperfectly, and with more resistance than I would like to admit. I am learning that in order to have a village, you have to be willing to be a villager. And a villager does not only show up when the energy is electric and the growth is obvious and the moment is serving them. A villager shows up on the quiet days too. On the unremarkable Tuesdays. On the days when someone else is in the turbulence you have already moved through — and they need you to sit still with them, even when stillness feels like the opposite of everything you are built for.

Being present for others, even when it is not immediately beneficial to you — even when it feels stagnant, even when the dynamic has shifted and the season feels past its peak — that is not weakness. That is not settling. That is the specific, underrated maturity of understanding that your stillness, in that moment, might be someone else's anchor. That the very thing that feels like regression to you could be exactly what holds another person together while they find their footing.

I have not fully mastered this. I am not sure I was built to. But I am practicing the art of staying just a little longer than my instincts tell me to — of distinguishing between a chapter that has genuinely ended and one that simply requires me to be something other than the one who benefits. Of learning that depth, real depth, is sometimes forged in the seasons that feel the least like growth from the inside.

The village I want — the one I have always, quietly, wanted — requires me. Not just the version of me who arrives when the conversation is brilliant and the energy is aligned and everything is in full bloom. It requires all of me. Even the part that is restless. Even the part that is always, somewhere in the back of her mind, already writing the next chapter.

Growing pains are not only about what you are becoming. They are also about learning to sit, occasionally, inside of what you already are — and trusting that something worth keeping is being built there, in the space between the arrivals.