Insights

What the work costs

The part nobody selling this will tell you about.

Nobody selling personal development wants to write this part down because it makes the sale harder.

But this is what happens. You change something real and some people go. Not in a big dramatic row. They just stop fitting, and you stop fitting them, and whatever arrangement the two of you had stops working, and neither of you says anything about it.

Then there's a stretch afterwards that's lonelier than anything before it, because you're not willing to go back to how it was and the new thing hasn't shown up yet. That stretch is where most people turn around. Because putting up with it looks worse from the outside than it feels from the inside, and holding a new standard for yourself with nobody around who's doing the same thing is genuinely hard. Anyone telling you it's clean is selling you something.

Other thing few people mention is that a wake-up call doesn't come with instructions. People assume the clarity shows up with it. Often what shows up is panic. You can see the thing now and you've got no idea what to do about it, which for a while is worse than not seeing it.

I went through both of my own worst stretches on my own and it took me way longer than it needed to. The hardest part for me wasn't even the loneliness. It was admitting it to myself and then saying it to somebody else. Just saying the words, I'm lonely. That took years.

That's the reason I run groups now.

So you should know the shape of this before you're in it. Mostly so that when the lonely part arrives it reads as a stage, and not as evidence you've made some kind of mistake.

What's below are the parts I'd prefer not to admit. But it's the truth. Grief and how long it runs, what changes in the people around you, and what to do while you're in the gap.