the heartbreak of carving your own path
personal growth requires change and sacrifice. when you grow as a person, you start losing parts of who you thought you were. (you have to!) as a great bearblogger said, "authenticity will automatically repel anything that doesn't resonate with you." that means that the more you grow, the more likely that everything and everyone that holds you and loves you will end up being repelled by a strange version of you. what kind of person would choose that on purpose?
of course, the people who truly love you would celebrate your growth and cheer you on at every step. maybe they would even join you in the next stages of your life. some, however, will inevitably drift away. others will get upset and take it out on you. further down your path, you might defensively downplay their importance to soften the pain of their absence. you might forget them, and worse still, you'll probably come to disown the person you were when they knew you. maybe you've come across an old journal entry, a video, some relic of yourself that you'd forgotten, and realized with sadness that you can't ever reach that person's soul again. "wow i really loved drawing." "i used to laugh so hard at her jokes, i can't believe things ended the way they did." even if you're mostly happy that you're no longer that person anymore, waves of nostalgia may still find you at the wrong moments and flood your mind with those now-golden memories.
we may be slow to change because we are preemptively avoiding this grief of letting our old lives go. in fact, at the point where we make the decision to pursue a new path, we are still in the old life. we're breaking down our own lives on the faint hope that a better one will emerge from its rubble. again, what sane person would do that? this perfectly rational avoidance may manifest in very reasonable-sounding explanations. "she'd feel left out if i started doing something different from what she likes." "i'm not even sure that i would like teaching that much." "we always go out drinking on the weekends, i need that time to unwind anyways." only you will know, deep down in your gut, whether or not you're lying to yourself.
it's all worth it in the end because there is almost nothing as important in this life as deeply understanding yourself. to be clear, i don't mean that you should quit your job and go start your career as a writer. quite the opposite, there are multitudinous paths to personal growth that are not so glamorous. i think most people should take pride in having boring jobs where they fight boldly in our neverending battle against entropy, but i digress. understanding yourself means reflecting on your experiences, noticing where your actions don't align with your self-image, continuously updating your beliefs one tiny step in the direction of truth, and updating your goals accordingly. you don't know where you'll end up and you don't know who will be there with you, but you act on the faith that one day, you'll be less of a stranger to yourself.
in the spirit of honesty to oneself... there's something that feels off about ending this post on such an uplifting note, some internal dissonance that i haven't quite worked out yet. some deep frustration with my past or present self? maybe a feeling of stuckness or uncertainty that i'm even on the right path at all or that i'm trying hard enough? maybe i'll figure it out someday.