Life is full of ups and downs lately. For me, many things changed. Most of all, I’ve changed. I used to think that staying the same was the goal. Stability meant safety. Consistency meant strength. As it turns out, I was wrong, and I guess, naive.
Within a short span of time, I was offered a place to study and research at a university in the UK. I also lost my best friend, had the most challenging time with my mental health, and learnt to let myself feel every unpleasant emotion I had carefully avoided for years. It felt as if life had stretched me in opposite directions at once.
I also moved my body with pilates. I cried whenever I felt like crying, and let myself laugh hard when something felt really funny. That might sound simple, but for someone who built her identity on being “in control,” letting myself feel was revolutionary.
After my best friend’s unexpected departure, I went to therapy. Therapy became a space where grief was allowed to take up room. I began to understand that mourning is not linear, not tidy, and certainly not something to “fix”. Grief asked me to slow down and witness my pain without rushing to make meaning out of it.
Grief is a strange companion.
It enters your body, rearranges your nervous system, and forces you to sit with questions you never wanted to ask or dared to ask. As someone with a background in psychology, I knew the theories about how grief worked. But no amount of knowledge will prepare you for living with and through the experience itself. That, in itself, is one of the hardest things I’ve had to learn.
The loss I had to deal with became a grand, painful teacher. It showed me that control is often just beautifully disguised fear. My days appeared okay and peaceful on the surface, but inside, I could not face the fact that I was changing. Things I used to like and do no longer made me feel good. I couldn’t find joy and meaning in them anymore. Part of that shift was grief reshaping my inner landscape.
When someone you love is no longer physically present, the world loses its familiar texture. I realised I was not only mourning her; I was mourning shared rituals, shared language, shared futures that would never unfold. And in that mourning, I had to accept that I was becoming someone new — someone marked by loss.
At first, I panicked. Who was I if I didn’t enjoy the same cafés, wasn’t me anymore? But grief — and therapy — gently taught me this: not finding joy in the old does not mean you are broken or lost. It actually means you are on the verge of building a new identity, evolving into who you’re meant to be.
Slowly, I stopped asking, “How can I go back to who I was?” and started asking, “Who am I becoming?”
So often, we cling to identities that once protected us: the high-achiever, thestrong one, the caregiver. For a long time, I thought those were simply who I was. But maybe I had parts of me that stepped forward when I needed to feel safe.
And I have other parts — softer ones, uncertain ones, and grieving ones — that deserve to be heard, too.
Therapy taught me that staying the same isn’t the goal in life. The goal, if there is one, might be alignment. Alignment between who we are today and how we choose to live, between our grief and our gratitude, and our fear and courage.
Losing my best friend broke something open in me.
It confronted me with the unbearable truth that love and loss are inseparable. Her absence is not something I “moved on” from; it is something I now carry differently. Grief has softened my edges, deepened my empathy, and reminded me that time with the people we love is never guaranteed.
It showed me how fragile life is, but also how expandable the human heart can be. I did not become stronger in the way I imagined. Instead, I became softer. And softness holds more power than rigidity ever did.
If you find yourself in a season where nothing feels quite like it used to, it might be a good thing. Perhaps you’re shedding an old version of yourself. And maybe becoming someone you didn’t plan to be is not a failure of consistency but a quiet act of courage.
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