Be Inspired..!!

That moment when growth hits different and everyone’s weirded out including you

So I started drinking water. Like, actually drinking it. Not just existing in a state of constant dehydration and pretending it was fine. I just one day decided my body deserved to not be parched all the time and committed to it.

My coworker looked at me after I’d gotten up three times to refill my water bottle in one meeting and was like “who even are you right now?” and I was like “I don’t know, but she’s hydrated.”

That’s when I realized growth isn’t this inspiring journey where everyone cheers. It’s actually kind of fucking weird. For everyone.

I started changing around the same time. Like, I actually started saying no to stuff. Can you imagine? Me, who used to say yes to literally everything because I was terrified of disappointing people. Suddenly I’m like “nope, can’t make it” and hanging up. No explanations. No long paragraph about why. Just no.

My mom called three times in one week. THREE. Because apparently saying “I can’t” without a 500-word justification feels like I’d personally wounded her. “Are you okay?” she kept asking. Like if I was genuinely okay, I wouldn’t have boundaries. As if mental health and availability are the same thing.

They’re not. But try explaining that to someone who raised you to be the family emotional support animal.

Here’s where it gets funny though. I started actually sleeping. Like, going to bed at a normal time and not scrolling until 2 AM. Not doing the thing where you’re so exhausted you can barely function but you keep pushing anyway because stopping feels like failure.

And I genuinely cannot stress this enough: actually sleeping changed my entire brain. Which sounds boring until you realize it means I had actual energy to be a human who set boundaries instead of just collapsing every night into a hole of exhaustion.

But my roommate thought I was dying. “Why are you going to bed at 10 PM on a Friday?” Like I’d announced I was joining a cult or something. I’m like, “Because my body needs rest?” And she’s standing there looking at me like I’d spoken in tongues. Then she started sleeping earlier too and literally got mad at herself for thinking I was weird first.

The worst part? When people change because you changed. Because now they’re both mad at you AND mad at themselves.

I also just… stopped being available at night. Like, I stopped picking up my phone after a certain time. I stopped being the person people called when they were spiraling. I stopped being available for the 11 PM emergency conversations where someone else’s crisis becomes my crisis and suddenly I’m awake at 2 AM managing their mental breakdown.

And that, that made me unavailable for other people’s emergencies.

My best friend literally got mad that I wasn’t available to hear about her breakup via phone call at 10 PM. “You changed,” she said. Not like it was a compliment. Like I’d committed a betrayal by deciding my sleep was worth protecting.

I hadn’t changed, though. I’d just become someone who could actually show up for her without completely destroying myself in the process. But that’s not as fun for people who got used to you being the one who broke.

The identity shift happens so quietly you don’t even notice it happening. You’re just like, “oh, I guess I’m a person who sleeps now. Weird.” And then three months later you’re completely different and everyone’s mad about it.

Your old friends make jokes about how “serious” you’ve become. Your family keeps waiting for you to snap back into being the version of you they were comfortable with. People start texting you less because you’re not posting the same desperation vibes anymore. The chaos-person energy isn’t coming through, and somehow that feels like a personal insult to them.

I started actually thinking about what I was doing with my time. Not obsessively. Just like, remembering where my hours went. Which apparently made me unrelatable to my entire social circle.

“You’ve changed so much,” people would say. Like it was something I did to them. Like my becoming okay was somehow me abandoning them.

And here’s the really awkward part: sometimes they’re kind of right. Because when you stop being broken, you can’t really hang out in the broken-person energy anymore. You can’t commiserate about how terrible everything is if you’re actively building something better. It’s like showing up to a funeral in a party hat.

But it’s not a betrayal. It’s just… different.

The sleep schedule, the boundary-setting, the unavailability, they’re just choices. But they’re choices that said “I’m going to take up space as someone who’s okay.” And that made people uncomfortable. Including me for like, six months.

But here’s what happened after the discomfort. The people who could hold space for the new version of me actually showed up. Not the ones who’d known me for fifteen years. The new ones. The ones who don’t remember when I was falling apart, so they don’t need me to stay that way.

And yeah, some people had to go. Not because they were bad. But because they were so invested in me being broken that they couldn’t recognize me when I got better. They’d literally look at me doing something basic like eating dinner at a normal time and act like I’d gone insane.

I’m not going to lie and say this feels good all the time. Identity shift is actually kind of lonely. You’re not the person you were, but you’re also not fully settled in who you’re becoming. You’re in this weird limbo where nothing fits and everything’s awkward.

But you know what? The sleep helps. The boundaries help. The actual rest helps. These little anchors that remind your body and brain that this new version of you is real and intentional.

And the people who get it? They get it immediately. They see you actually functioning and they’re like “oh, she’s actually doing this” and they just show up differently.

That’s the part they don’t tell you about growth. It’s not inspiring. It’s not a straight line. It’s bumpy and people get mad and you sometimes wonder if you’re being selfish. But it’s also the only way to become someone you can actually live with.

So if you’re in that weird space right now where you’re changing and it’s making everyone uncomfortable, including you, you’re not crazy. You’re not betraying anyone. You’re just becoming someone who can actually function, and unfortunately, that might make you incompatible with people who needed you to be broken.

That’s not your problem to solve.

I write about this stuff constantly on my Substack because nobody talks about the awkward middle of growth. Not the before, not the after. The weird, unfunny, actually-kind-of-hilarious middle where you’re sleeping like a normal person and your mom’s concerned and your old friends are confused and you’re just out here trying to exist without imploding.

Come read it. It’s messy. It’s real. And honestly, it’s probably going to make someone uncomfortable because you’ll recognize yourself. Might as well come miserable as part of a community instead of alone.

We can figure this out together.