Morning Shelby,

The up and downs of family eh!

Sounds pretty simple to me – you are changing, in fact, you have already changed.  You are simply being your true self, the one that’s been buried for so long, all I see in those conversations is someone starting to be more self-assertive – which is an awesome thing – and not a cow in any way in my book.  All they know if the previous subservient Shelby, the easy one so it will just take them some time to catch up with the change, but they will.  It’s hard, the first few times you stand up for yourself, your stomach does knots with worry about causing confrontation and you feel like apologising to get back to ‘normal’. Sit with it, it’ll be ok, they’ll still love you and accept you – it’s part of that whole being your real self thing for true acceptance.

And yeah, life can sure be easier if you aren’t aware – but you are what you are and tbh, life without awareness is pretty pointless at times.  It seems harder with awareness but really, it’s way more freeing and meaningful. Eventually.

I get what you mean about the friends. It has to be equal effort right, if it feels like it’s only you who does all the ‘work’, it quickly feels like they don’t really value you. And you know what, some won’t for sure. But out of that huge group will be plenty who will step forwards when you pull back. I had something similar on leaving work – after all, been there 15 odd years, lots of people I considered good friends, not colleagues.  Some of which like you say, if I don’t make the effort to stay in touch would defn fall by the wayside but there’s the others who just as regularly reach out to me. You just need to give them the space to do it.

You may also find you’ve outgrown some of your friends too. Part of life is finding those people in sync with you at that point of your life. I’ve had amazing connections travelling as meaningful as age old friends – it’s all different.

I’m pretty sure Tiny Buddha isn’t going to care too much what direction this thread takes. But you could always start a new one I guess – what would you call it?