Season of Change: From Loss to Growth in Relationships

Learning to rebuild in a season of endings

Whenever I thought about how my final year of university would look, I never thought it would look like this. Staring out of a train window, undertaking my first journey back home during the term time, in my entire three years of my degree. It felt like a strange season of my life, one I hadn’t prepared for. I never expected to run away like that. So eagerly as well, with books falling out of my bag because I was packing it so quickly. And I couldn’t have run up those undesirable stairs to the station, with those books weighing me down, quicker if I tried. Outside, January looked appropriately seasonal: grey skies, bare trees, rainwater clinging to the grass. Inside, my perfect walls were crumbling around me and I just wanted to be home.

I don’t think I come across as particularly assertive or decisive. I have a very low social battery and I’m always thinking about what other people may think about the decisions that I make. It comes from the pursuit of perfection; the perfect social interaction or the perfect decision. It is, at heart, an anxiety-driven pursuit, originating from an ever growing desire for control and a need to protect my sensitive skin from the lashings of the beast that is life.

So you could perhaps never imagine how much my voice cracked when I actually said no. When I said that I couldn’t see him again. When I rejected his request to at least just be friends.

You could perhaps never imagine the reluctance I felt to let go of the imperfect after months of trying to make it perfect.

When walls that you’ve been trying to build around you finally collapse, there is a great stillness. You realise, at last, how much you have been busying yourself with investing your precious time into something that didn’t come to fruition. You stare longingly at the fallen bricks and you spend time trying to figure out what to do with them. And the answer will not come the next day. Nor will it come in the next week or the next month. Processing is the slow art of repurposing those bricks you invested into the project that was never meant to be, to build something new. Unfortunately, the more bricks you invested, the longer that journey of repurposing takes. In this situation, you may be inclined to just stare at the damage, with no desire to fix anything. That’s what I did. People watching from the café window with a coffee in hand, a kind of seasonal stillness hanging in the air.

You never really know what goes on in people’s lives until you go through something yourself and you realise how effectively you slipped away when no one was watching. In the morning I was sitting in a seminar room, by the evening I was back home in my bedroom after a long train journey. Home is far enough away from university to feel almost like a different world. I found myself imagining the normal churning of day-to-day life with people getting on with things, while I felt the stillness of my childhood bedroom. Yet the stillness was what I wanted, to be away from the movement of changing seasons. I always felt safe at home and I just wanted to feel safe again.

Some might characterise my actions as somewhat melodramatic. I imagine that if I am fortunate enough to live into my eighties, this experience would be narrated either comically or through the knowledge of some retrospective wisdom. The in my early twenties, this happened to me moment that brings a sense of nostalgia when spoken. I hope that is the case. In a way, I know it one day will be. Yet, looking back, I’ve really had to come to terms with my whole worldview of love and myself. I’ve always characterised love as a great struggle because that has been my experience. It has led to a great investment of myself to make something happen and thus, when it didn’t, I lost a huge part of myself. What I didn’t realise sitting in my room was that real love is not about investing yourself but about being yourself. The right person sees you and asks nothing from you that they cannot give themselves. They are invested just by seeing you as you are, only taking when they know that they can give. Sometimes, it takes a painful experience to understand that. Unfortunately, that was the case for me.

It’s felt horrible at times. Not to mention the impact that the cold January season has on one’s self-esteem. I just felt like taking back all that I had lost and I began to feel compounded by a deep sense of regret for everything that happened. It was going nowhere because I couldn’t take everything back. It was useless and I felt useless.

In moments like this, why becomes a strong word. Why did he do this? Why didn’t I say anything? Why did he leave? It becomes a strong word because when left unanswered, we are left asking these questions, even though the answer will never come. I knew that I would have to grow to accept that the relationship had many imperfections, and that even the way it ended was seasonal, shaped by timing as much as choice. But I didn’t realise that I would also have to accept that the way that it ended was imperfect too. How he travelled so far to see me, yet said so little when he was actually here. How he said we were well-suited to one another, yet never made anything happen. How he hugged me goodbye, struggled to let me go, yet walked out of the door so easily. All I had to be thankful for was that I turned confusion into clarity. I cut the rope, clearing my logic of all hindrances, allowing my conscience to breathe. But my heart was lying somewhere at the bottom of the pit with the person I had let go of. Because clearing the conscience isn’t quite the same as closing the door. So many things were left unsaid, you could taste the tension in the air of that conversation. How fake was the wall I put between us, but how necessary it was to maintain my self-respect. I was determined to stay on my side of the wall, but why was the one word somehow getting through.

I tried to run away from that word by making myself busy. When I was at home, I made the effort to wake up early, write my essays, and do the laundry. My parents were away travelling but they also gave me instructions for where all the essentials might be. My mum said “If you look inside my handbag on the chair, you can use my gym card and go swimming if you want.” And so with my mum’s gym card and the car keys in hand, I took a trip down to the swimming pool in the afternoon. Laps in the pool are quite the repetitive thing when you think about it. You’re not exactly going anywhere but to me it felt like I was. Time and space put together felt like my greatest enemy back then. I didn’t want the space or the time to entertain thinking because thinking was too painful. The truth is, I didn’t like the way things had turned out and living it felt like trying to identify with something that felt so alien to me. All I felt comfortable with was the past version of myself I had let go of because I had not yet formed a concrete identity beyond that. I had not yet understood that identity itself can be seasonal. I kept asking myself why did this happen to me? But I think the bigger question I had yet to ask myself then was why did this happen to me now, in this season? Because everything that you let go of, gives space for something better and all the losses don’t just happen but occur in the wider story of what was meant to be. Thinking that way when I didn’t have the emotional space felt scary. So I kept myself busy.

One of the hardest aspects of this experience was being patient with myself. I thought that if I spent a week at home, I would come back and the clouds would have cleared. Yet the rain in January didn’t disappear then and neither did the storm clouds in my mind. Little did I know, I was still carrying a broken heart on the train back to Durham. How silly! I thought to myself. I am 21 years old and I have my whole life ahead of me. Why am I so broken? I suppressed the answer to that question by acting as though I was better. Yet, one day, I was speaking to my mum on the phone when the floodgates decided to open and I couldn’t make it stop. I will not lie, a relationship not working out is hardly the worst thing to happen in someone’s life. Aside from that part of my life not yielding the results I wanted, a lot of things were going right. And it really is a privilege to have a mum who’s willing to listen to your venting. But it’s hard when part of you just wants to be heard.

It wasn’t until that point when I realised how much I had been wanting a relationship. At the end of a long day of seminars, I would find myself curled up on the end of my bed wondering why the tears were still falling. I could always feel a cold breeze on my skin in those moments, I felt so exposed. The truth is, I had always been open to someone entering my life but that person didn’t come as easily as I had expected. It felt like a long process of waiting around for a man that I liked to turn up and when he did and it clicked, I couldn’t let it go. I only did let it go because a higher version of myself was speaking to me on that morning and I chose to listen to it. I don’t really know what came over me. I had not the desire, the strength, or even enough dislike of the guy to really make that decision. I just did it despite how I felt. The dominant voice in that moment was not the emotional one, it was the rational one who was completely detached from the situation and thus had the power to make that decision. But the inferior voice didn’t disappear with the wind of the seasons. In fact, she came back with a vengeance when she didn’t get her way. “You don’t understand!” I told my mum. “You don’t understand how long I’ve had to wait already.” And all my mum could do was nod solemnly when the inferior voice was finally given a microphone.

I spent a long time thinking about scarcity after everything ended. Beneath all the tears was a quieter fear: the fear of having to continue the rest of my time at university alone again. Not because I hadn’t done it before, but because I had already waited so long for someone to arrive. Scarcity changes the way you approach relationships. It convinces you that rare things must be held onto, even when they’re not good for you, a seasonal fear lingering underneath everything.

I’ve always admired people who can find such happiness whilst having so little. Sometimes they find such happiness from having so little. I used to struggle to understand that. How is that possible when you have little to nothing tangible in your life to hold onto?

Maybe the answer is that nothing really belongs to us forever. Everything we have, we rent, even if the length of the rent varies. Things, people, versions of ourselves will all pass through our lives seasonally. So perhaps healing is not learning how to avoid loss, but learning how to experience something fully without demanding permanence from it. There’s a quiet power in knowing that.

That’s what my therapist told me. Sometimes people come into our lives for a season, and the difficulty is learning not to mistake a season for a lifetime. I’ve always achieved great peace by speaking to someone about how I feel. I went through quite a tough time at sixth form with stress and anxiety. It was difficult to admit that I was struggling but once I said it out loud to someone who knew how to unpack everything that I was thinking, I felt the greatest sense of relief. It’s not that I intend to turn all my negative experiences onto myself. It’s just that some experiences are so confusing that it’s emotionally harmful to handle it all alone.

It was February and I was sitting in my room which, being at the back of the house, naturally feels more sombre. I felt nervous to open up. I started to imagine what it would be like to become a shadow and retreat into the darkness for a bit. But I was enticed out of my shell when the online meeting started and a kind-looking woman with big round glasses appeared on my screen. There is something so soothing about hearing a northern accent when you’re down. I imagined it being like a big warm hug in the shape of a voice. That’s what it felt like to me at least. I really needed to hear a voice like that, especially since my voice rattled like a marble in a glass bottle as soon as I began to recount what had happened. It was weird because I had found a way not to cry in day-to-day life, hiding myself in the busyness of things. Yet, I felt a huge lump form in my throat as soon as I began to unpack everything. I began to talk about the conversation that I had with the guy who promised me a discussion about ‘us’ when he arrived in Durham but struggled to bring the topic up. When I decided to bring the topic up to him, he said “I actually think we could be quite good together, I just don’t know what I want to do with my life.” You don’t know how settling it felt when my therapist said to me “How did you feel then? It sounds as though there were two separate conversations happening there with him.” I wasn’t sure what she meant by that at first, but then I realised his words and his actions had been speaking different languages all along. When I understood that, I felt the lump in my throat disappear.

It doesn’t mean you’re stupid when you choose to stay in something that was never meant to be. Your logic can be there all along and you can even be aware that it is. Yet sometimes, your attachment is so strong that you choose staying over leaving, even when it is not good for you. I don’t like giving myself credit but I suppose I am proud of myself for leaving even though the attachment was strong. I was logically aware that the situation wasn’t right for me and would never be right for me and I chose to listen to that. However, because I acted against how I felt, I was operating in two minds for months after things ended. One that felt, one that knew, one that stayed, and one that left, different parts of me shifting like they belonged to different seasons. Two different ways of thinking operating in the same place was a recipe for going crazy but now I do not think they were ever separate. They were just different ways of trying to protect me, speaking at different volumes depending on what was at stake.

The rational voice was not cold, even if it sounded like it. It was trying to reduce damage. The emotional voice was not weak, even if it felt overwhelming. It was trying to preserve meaning. In the months that followed, I kept waiting for one voice to disappear. For the feeling to catch up with the decision, or the decision to undo the feeling. But neither of them did. They just both learned how to speak less loudly and be less at war with one another. And eventually I realised it was not about choosing between two minds. It was about letting both of them loosen their grip on something that had already ended.

And it was then that I realised, you have to let the dandelion die to blow away the seeds. Not everything is meant to survive every season unchanged.