Seasons of Shedding and Becoming

Life moves in seasons. There are times of growth, flowering, and abundance. There are times of shedding, of falling away, of letting go. This is a season of letting go. A season of listening.

It is time to release what no longer serves us. To allow the things we have outgrown to drift away quietly or violently without guilt. To let ourselves be redefined not by the judgments of others, not by the expectations we have carried for years, but by the truth of who we are now.

We are allowed to grow and change. We are allowed to become. Becoming is not neat. Becoming is painful. It demands unlearning, unraveling, and undoing. It asks us to confront what we have absorbed, what we have tolerated, and what we have believed about ourselves.

Sometimes if we do not listen to our bodies, our minds, our madness, it will tend to us. We know this because we have unraveled before. We have allowed jobs and people to define us. We have taken on career titles, responsibilities, and roles that were never truly ours only to discover they suffocate rather than nourish.

This is the moment to ask who am I without all of this? What do I truly want? What no longer nourishes me?

I am closing a chapter. A toxic workplace, a space where my voice was unseen and my presence unvalued. I am questioning a certification, a title that the state insists defines my worth in peer support. Peer support, once mutual and compassionate, has become hierarchical, transactional, and performative. It mirrors the harms I have endured in the past, the manipulations and betrayals I survived. I am done.

And yet in this ending there is a sacred opening. I am choosing to wash myself of what no longer serves me. To burn it all down and create something new. To rebuild a life and a practice that honors me, that honors shared experience, that does not replicate harm.

This is our season of listening. To ourselves. To our bodies. To our grief, our joy, our rage, our quiet longing. We are learning to let go of the expectations and judgments of others. What others think does not define our worth. What others like or dislike does not diminish the value of our becoming.

We are shedding. We are standing in our own truth. We are ready to grow into something wild, fierce, and wholly our own.

This is the rhythm of our lives. We are learning finally to move with it.