21/01/2026
Is 2026 your year to change?
The moments things shift. By Mara.L
She didn’t change all at once. That was the cruelest part—how gradual it was, how invisible to everyone but her.
For years, Mara had been the soft place. The listener. The one who remembered birthdays, smoothed over tensions, swallowed discomfort with a practiced smile. She was the friend who adjusted herself like furniture—moving just enough so others could pass through the room more easily. And for a long time, she mistook that for love.
Then something inside her shifted.
It wasn’t dramatic. No explosion, no declaration. Just a quiet exhaustion that settled into her bones. A moment when someone interrupted her—again—and she didn’t laugh it off. A day when she realised her chest hurt every time she said “it’s fine” when it wasn’t. A night when she cried, not because something terrible had happened, but because nothing ever changed.
So she began to speak.
At first it was tentative. Small sentences wrapped in apologies. “I just wanted to say how that landed for me.” “I don’t think I can do that this time.” “That hurt, actually.”
The room changed.
Her friends tilted their heads, confused. Some smiled tightly. Others went silent. It was as though she’d broken an unspoken contract—one she hadn’t known she’d signed but had been honouring her whole life.
She noticed it in the pauses first. Conversations continued without her. Invitations arrived later, if at all. When she shared her feelings, they were reframed as problems. “You’re being sensitive.” “You’ve changed.” “Why are you making everything so heavy?”
What they didn’t say—but what she felt—was clearer: You are no longer useful in the way you were.
Mara tried to explain. She told them she wasn’t angry, just honest. That she wasn’t rejecting them, only refusing to disappear inside the friendship anymore. She spoke about needing mutual care, about wanting to feel safe to be herself.
They heard accusation where she meant vulnerability.
Soon, they began to talk about her instead of to her. She felt it in the air—how her name carried a warning now. She was “difficult.” “Intense.” “Always bringing things up.” The same honesty they once praised now made them uncomfortable, because it asked something of them.
And they didn’t want to give.
The loneliness that followed was sharp and disorienting. Not the absence of people—but the absence of being known. She grieved not only the friendships, but the version of herself that believed endurance was the same as belonging.
At night, she turned inward, because there was nowhere else to look.
That’s where the deeper ache lived.
She began to see the pattern—not just with friends, but everywhere. How she learned early that love was conditional. That being easy meant being safe. That taking up space risked abandonment. She traced it back to rooms where her feelings were inconvenient, to moments where silence kept the peace, to the quiet pride she felt when adults said she was “so mature for her age.”
She realised she had been trained to survive, not to be met.
And survival had cost her more than she’d ever admitted.
There was rage there, once she allowed it. Grief too. Grief for all the times she stayed when she should have left, all the times she made herself smaller so others could feel bigger. Grief for the friendships that loved her compliance but not her truth.
Some days she wondered if she had imagined it all. If maybe they were right. If standing up for herself really did make her unlovable.
But then she noticed something else.
The way her body felt quieter when she didn’t force herself into rooms that required her silence. The way her breath deepened when she told the truth, even when her voice shook. The way her reflection slowly softened, no longer braced for impact.
She was still lonely—but she was no longer lost.
Mara began to understand that not everyone who walks with you is meant to walk beside you forever. Some only stay as long as you carry their weight. And when you set it down, they call it betrayal.
She didn’t become harder. She became clearer.
And clarity, she learned, has a way of thinning crowds.
What remained was grief, yes—but also integrity. A growing trust in herself. A sense that the friendships she would one day build would not require her to bleed quietly to belong.
She wasn’t served by silence anymore.
And even though it hurt—deeply, profoundly—she knew this much was true:
Losing people who only loved the version of you that endured being walked over is not failure.
It is the beginning of freedom.
