the five stages of grief
In one of the weekly sessions of the poetry club I attend (though irregularly), I remember the host asking, “What is the cost of change, of becoming a different person?” That week’s theme was 2025 Reflections, and he said the cost is everything.
I tend to agree. Life morphs you in ways you never anticipated. It shoves, twists, drags you into forms you may not have wanted, whether for better or worse. We like to think we choose who we become, but more often, changed is inflicted: by circumstances, loss, or simply the relentless passage of time.
There are five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. And I think becoming a different person is grief in itself. It’s in the often-unrecognized mourning of all what you were and all what you could’ve been. Every forced shift carries a small death: habits you can’t reclaim, dreams you no longer salvage, versions of yourself that vanish.
I’ve felt bitterness bruise into me, a residue of being re-assembled unwillingly into someone different, sometimes slightly more crooked. Yet, I try to believe forced change is the only path for growth (In the five stages of grief, you learn acceptance. You can slam walls, scream into the void, rage at the unfairness of it all, but eventually you accept it. Otherwise, you spend your life trapped, oscillating between denial, anger, bargaining and depression).
To bloom into someone new, we must confront the fragments of ourselves we leave behind, no matter how painful. You see not just what you’ve lost, but what you still can carry forward.