A river carves stone,
Not through force, but by yielding.
Change is not loud, but inevitable.
The Years That Broke Me Open
Growth never arrives gently. It does not ask if you are ready. It does not come wrapped in soft words or easy choices. It arrives like a slow, rising tide, reshaping the shore of your life grain by grain, until one day, you realize you are standing on entirely different ground.
I once believed that growth would come from victory. That it would rise from achievements, from moments of celebration, from the feeling of standing atop something I had built with my own hands. But that is not where I found it. Growth came from the nights when silence sat too heavy on my chest. From the moments I lost things I thought I could not live without. From standing in the wreckage of what I had once called certainty, knowing I had no choice but to rebuild.
It came in three forms:
- The loss I did not ask for. The kind that takes without warning. The kind that leaves you staring at the space where something once was, knowing nothing will ever quite fit there again.
- The mistakes I made with my own hands. The kind that tasted bitter, that burned with the sting of knowing better but failing anyway. The kind that taught me that failure is not an ending, only a teacher with a cruel but necessary lesson.
- The moments I chose discomfort. The kind where I could have stayed where I was, safe, untouched, but instead stepped forward, into uncertainty, into the unfamiliar, because some things are worth the risk of falling.
Growth is not clean. It is not elegant. It is raw, uneven, marked by scars and the quiet realization that you are not the same person you were before.
The Weight of Change
- There are doors that only open when everything else has been taken from you.
- Some lessons can only be learned through pain, and some wisdom is born from loss.
- You cannot rush becoming. The hardest truths take time to settle into the bones.
- A person is not who they say they are. They are the sum of what they have survived.
There is no growth without surrender. Without letting go of who you were, without allowing yourself to be shaped by the tides of experience.
You do not grow by clinging.
You grow by yielding.
Wabi-Sabi and the Beauty of Becoming
Wabi-sabi teaches that nothing is permanent, nothing is perfect, nothing is complete. Growth is not about fixing yourself, but about understanding that you were never meant to be finished.
- A cracked bowl is still a vessel.
- A fallen leaf is still part of the tree.
- A life that has been broken is still a life worth living.
We do not become whole by avoiding pain.
We become whole by embracing the beauty of our own imperfection.
Lessons from the Unfinished Self
- The hardest years teach the softest wisdom.
- You are not who you were, and that is a beautiful thing.
- Pain is not the end of you. It is the beginning of something new.
- Letting go is not losing. It is making space for something else.
- Every scar, every wound, every ache has shaped you into who you are becoming.
The River, the Stone, the Self That Remains
I once feared change. I resisted it, fought against it, clung to the things I thought defined me. But change does not wait for permission. It moves through you, reshaping everything, leaving you raw, unsteady, unfamiliar even to yourself.
And yet, standing here, on the other side of it, I see what I could not before.
I am still here.
Different. Marked. Softer in some places, sharper in others. But still here.
And that is enough.
life 
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