The Necessary Wreckage of Becoming

Not everyone can come with you.

There’s a kind of grief we don’t talk about enough. I think we avoid it, maybe because we don’t even recognize it as grief.

But part of my work, as a grief therapist, is to point to pain and ask: Have you considered this might be grief?

The kind I’m naming today is the grief we feel when we witness the necessary wreckage of our own becoming.

It’s the ache that arrives when we stop shape-shifting. When we no longer contort ourselves to stay pleasing, palatable, familiar.

People notice.

“The old you wouldn’t have done that.”
“You know better.”

Their words are cloaked versions of “Ouch.” The pain of having expected you to stay the same. Forever and always.

Sometimes the feedback is gentler, more regulated:

“I’m going to miss you…and I’m also proud of you.”
“This is disappointing, but I appreciate your honesty.”

Still, it stings. We hurt people when we move away.
We hurt them when we tell the truth.
When we set boundaries.
When we say “no.”
And even more deeply, when we say “no more.”

This is the cost of becoming: not everyone can, or will, come with us.

Recently, I watched a beloved friend announce the completion of her sex therapy certification - an accomplishment earned by fewer than 5,000 people in this country. It’s long, arduous, and soul-deep work. She’s also been courageously naming the hypocrisy, oppression, and violence she witnessed in the church - especially within purity and modesty culture. She’s been renegotiating her relationship to faith, questioning inherited beliefs, refusing to stay in spaces that violate her integrity.

She’s held tender, difficult conversations with well-meaning family and friends who feel worried, disoriented, or left behind. She’s poured her energy into helping women reclaim their bodies from systems that taught them to fear or outsource their pleasure.

She is, in every sense, becoming.
And as with all of us, her becoming has involved tears, doubts, shaky truths, and eventually, surrender to this: we cannot control how people respond to our truth.

And when others feel grief about who we no longer are, we can feel complicated things about causing that grief.

Because there is, undeniably, a cost to truth. And that cost is grief.

When we align with who we are becoming - our truest, most honest form -we shed what cannot come with us. I think of it like a dog in spring, blowing their winter coat. Tufts of soft underfur float through sunlight. The weight of winter, let go.

Even when loss is for good, healthy, necessary reasons, it still hurts.

Sometimes we are the ones being shed.
We’re on the receiving end of someone else’s “no,” their “not anymore,” or their “I need something different now.”

And wow, is it harder to extend grace when we’re the one left behind.

At least for me.

We tell ourselves stories to make sense of the pain: They’re impulsive. They’re unreliable. They’re not who I thought they were. Stories to hold the ache in place.

But when we do our own internal work, we might arrive at a softer story. One that sounds like: “Ouch. This hurts. I’m disappointed, sad, or grieved…and I still want goodness. For both of us.”

Because telling the truth, even just by living it, can rupture relationships, shift dynamics, and challenge what others expect from us.

But sometimes letting people down is the most loving thing we can do.

Not because we’re careless - but because we’re finally being careful with ourselves. And we’re giving only what we can wholeheartedly give.

It’s inevitable, when we grow, shift, or tell the truth, someone may feel left behind or wounded by the change. Even when we’re doing something necessary or aligned, we might cause harm. And when we realize that, the grief can be doubled: pain for what we’ve lost, and remorse for what we may have caused.

It’s important to remember that regret and integrity can co-exist. That you can honor your own expansion and take responsibility for the ways your truth rippled out.

Sometimes, the impulse is to fix it right away. To explain. To make it better. But direct repair isn’t always possible or appropriate. The other person may not be ready, or willing, to receive it. Or maybe the dynamic itself is no longer safe for open-hearted dialogue.

In those cases, we practice living amends.

Living amends are not grand gestures or perfect apologies. They’re a quiet commitment to embodying what you’ve learned. It might sound like:

“I honor the boundaries I couldn’t hold then, and do it better now.”

“I speak more carefully, more truthfully, because I know what it cost not to.”

“I treat others with the consideration I failed to offer before.”

“I live in a way that reflects my values, even if I learned them the hard way.”

Living amends are for the person we hurt, yes, but also for the version of ourselves who didn’t know better yet, and the version we’re still becoming.

Let the grief be part of the process. Let it mark the places where something real shifted. You don’t owe everyone your sameness. You owe yourself your becoming.