Seasons of Change

It was 2015. I had been in a relationship for about two years.

I was sitting at my desk working on an assignment when my partner appeared in the doorway, he made a comment about the fact that I had been working on my computer all day. The conversation took a turn, voices sharpened and an argument ensued.

I felt the familiar surge rising in my body – heat, defensiveness, the pull toward reaction. My emotions flared and, without thinking, I stormed out of the house toward the back garden.

As I reached the door, I suddenly stopped.

It felt as though I had walked into an invisible barrier.

For the first time, I wasn't inside the reaction – I was watching it. he anger felt familiar. The urge to defend myself felt familiar. Even leaving the room felt rehearsed, like a scene my nervous system already knew by heart.

In that moment of stillness, something inside me woke up.

This moment was not new. I had lived multiple versions of it – different conversations, different circumstances, but the same emotional ending. The same repeating patterns.

Standing there, I understood that nothing outside of me needed to change first. The argument wasn’t the real problem. The relationship wasn’t even the real problem.

I was meeting a version of myself I could no longer carry forward.

Looking back now, I recognise that moment as the beginning of a different season — a season of becoming.

We often imagine transformation arriving as clarity or peace, but more often it begins in discomfort. In life-changing moments of recognition and realisation that confront us with a deeper truth … if we want change, we cannot keep on repeating patterns that were cultivated as protection. Especially when those patterns are born out of trauma and dysfunction.

For nearly a decade prior I had been taught a new language. A language of self -empowerment and growth. I understood the concepts. Yet there were deeper habits that lived in my body, in my programming.

That day, something shifted from understanding to awareness.

Self-sabotage doesn't always look dramatic. Sometimes it looks like repeating reactions and defending old identities long after they have stopped serving us.

The season of self-sabotage wasn't ending because life suddenly became easier. It ended because I could finally see myself clearly enough to choose differently.

Life moves in cycles, though we rarely recognise them while we are inside them. There are seasons of building, seasons of breaking, seasons where something quietly dissolves beneath the surface before anything new appears.

The space between can feel confusing and unsettling, because we are no longer who we were, not yet certain of who we are becoming, and often have no clue on how to get there. It is often here that the deepest change begins.

Transformation rarely announces itself loudly. More often it arrives in ordinary moments – an argument, a pause, a simple breath taken differently than before. A moment where awareness interrupts habit long enough for choice to enter.

Sometimes awakening is not peaceful at all … perhaps the seasons of our lives change not when everything around us shifts, but rather when we finally recognise the outdated version of ourselves that we are ready to leave behind.

Maybe you have felt something like this too – a quiet knowing that something witin you is asking to grow beyond what has been familiar.

If so, you may already be standing at your own threshold.

Becoming is rarely loud, but it is always honest.