Not everyone handles change well. As a primary teacher, I know that for many of the students if any change was coming, I’d need to ease them into it. I know personally I can struggle with some changes, but it’s not necessarily the environment in which I I struggle with it’s people, even more specifically relationships. But we can’t always prepare for it and not all change makes a person spiral. It can improve everything.

Even with my husband, I found around the second year and third year to be quite difficult. We were both changing. The relationship was solidifying and it wasn’t just dates anymore it was becoming a lifetime at that point. With PTSD, I find trust hard to express. It takes me a long time to confidently say I trust someone. By the second and third year, I found myself still questioning whether I trusted my own husband. It was such an interesting conversation to have with my therapist at the time.

The therapist simply asked, “Michael, do you trust Joel?”

And I sat there in my own astonishment realising that I had yet to allow myself to completely trust them. My reply was, “Joel’s my husband. I should trust them. Doesn’t it automatically happen?”

I’m not even kidding. I believed trust just automatically happened. I felt awful, but the steps I took to make the decision to trust them changed our relationship completely.

We are couple goals, as we are constantly reminded. To our delight.

But not all changes in relationships are positive ones and it’s these ones that I find unsettling, especially when it’s nothing that I’ve done. It just happened naturally with no explanations.

I had a relationship for about a year with a wonderful person. It truly was a great relationship but towards the end their mental health was struggling. They weren’t able to communicate like they once did. Soon our weekly chats were turning monthly and then it became not at all. My skin crawled. My PTSD and mental health tried to put the blame on me.

“What did I do?” was asked heaps and my brain would find many reasons as to what I could have done.

Relationships can be seasons and sometimes the shift between seasons can be a difficult one to adjust to.

Another relationship didn’t quite reach a year, but as I learn that friendships work both ways, I realised (too late in this instance) that I was giving more effort in the relationship than I was receiving. I had to fight (almost physically) the guilt I felt walking away from that friendship. Especially when, almost like glass shattering, they started to gaslight me.

My brain does enough gaslighting to myself. My imposter syndrome was a professional at it. I didn’t need someone I trusted to suddenly do the same.

But the truth of the matter is this…things change all the time. It never stays the same, especially with people. Being a neurodivergent person, a Non-Binary person, a traumatised person, a survivor of domestic violence and bullying, escaping conversion therapy…you can imagine how letting someone you care about go can be quite difficult.

The last month I’ve dealt with letting someone else go as their mental health deteriorated. I did all I could to stay by their side but they kept pushing me away. Their words becoming more accusations, hurtful and gaslighting…in the end they’d tell me I wasn’t willing to talk it out, but what they meant to say was, I wasn’t going to give in and accept that I was this awful person they were trying to convince me to be. My mental health does that enough. I don’t need anyone in my life again just echoing what I think.

Letting go when you can’t change with the change is the hardest part of growing up. It can take so much time to “get over it”, but let’s face the truth here, sometimes you never do. It’s like grief. The pain may dull sometimes but it will always be there.

Change. Some we can cope. Some surprises us. It’s important to acknowledge and it and accept the feelings that come with it. It happens to us all. Physically. Mentally. Emotionally. Our environment. Take it step by step.

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Speaking of change. Change is coming to this website, too. It’s already started. Instead of every other week, I’m posting monthly. I’ve refrained from free reads because no donations were coming in anymore. If I make the rules, I’ve got to stick to them right? Story Stones will be returning soon and a focus on a writing group online presence is coming. I also need to market my books more!