I don’t know what I’m going to do with this.
That’s the truth.
I don’t have some beautiful revelation at the end of this. I don’t have the lesson neatly packaged. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next.
And maybe that’s why I’m writing it.
Because sometimes I think we put so much pressure on ourselves to only speak once we’ve figured something out.
Once we’ve healed.
Once we’ve found the lesson.
Once we can look back and say, “This is what it taught me.”
I’m not there.
I’m still in it.
And what I’m in right now is grief.
I don’t want to just be his friend.
There.
I said it.
I don’t know what I want instead. I genuinely don’t.
But I know I don’t want to take something that became intimate, vulnerable, confusing, beautiful, painful, and real to me—and put it neatly back into the friendship box like nothing happened.
Maybe somebody else can do that.
Maybe he can.
But I don’t know how to.
And I don’t think that means there’s something wrong with me.
I think it means something happened inside of me.
For a few weeks, I experienced a kind of comfort with another person that I don’t experience easily.
I’m outgoing.
I can talk to damn near anybody.
I can walk into a room and be myself.
But intimacy?
That’s different.
There are parts of me that are shy.
Parts of me that don’t come out unless I feel safe.
Parts of me that I protect because I don’t just let everybody into my world.
And somehow, with him, I felt comfortable.
I felt like I could talk about my world.
My thoughts.
My weirdness.
My ideas.
My feelings.
My body.
My life.
I felt like I could just… be.
And now I’m sitting here wondering how the hell I’m supposed to go back to being just friends with somebody who I experienced that way.
I don’t know.
I don’t know how to do that.
And the thought of having nothing at all?
That makes me cry.
Every damn time.
I don’t like that.
I don’t like how much it hurts.
I don’t like feeling like I’m losing somebody.
I don’t like the possibility that something I allowed myself to experience could end up being something I have to grieve instead of something I get to keep.
And I especially don’t like the part of me that wants to find a way to make it mean something different so I don’t have to hurt.
Because I don’t know what happens next.
I don’t know if he comes back.
I don’t know if I ever want him to.
I don’t know if we could build something different.
I don’t know if friendship is possible for me.
I don’t know if distance is what I need.
I don’t know.
What I do know is what I don’t want.
I don’t want to pretend it didn’t matter.
I don’t want to reduce it to sex.
I don’t want to act like I can simply erase the intimacy and return to the exact person I was before it happened.
And I don’t want to force myself to be okay with something just because someone else is okay with it.
Maybe that’s part of my lesson.
Not the lesson that says, “Let go.”
Not the lesson that says, “Move on.”
Not even the lesson that says, “Everything happens for a reason.”
I’m not ready for all of that shit.
Maybe the lesson right now is simply:
Tell the truth about where you are.
I’m hurting.
I don’t want to just be his friend.
I don’t know what I want instead.
And I don’t know what I’m going to do with that.
But I am finally allowing myself to admit it.
And maybe that’s enough for today.
And at the time, that was all I knew.
I didn’t know what would happen next.
I didn’t know what I would learn from it.
I didn’t know that the truth I was sitting in would continue to change as I lived through it.
And then life continued.
We talked again.
There was still care there.
There was still familiarity there.
And for a moment, I found myself wondering if maybe I had been trying to grieve something that wasn’t completely gone.
But sometimes you don’t need another dramatic ending to understand that something has changed.
Sometimes you just notice the distance.
You notice what is no longer being offered.
You notice what no longer feels safe.
And eventually, you have to tell yourself the truth about what you’re actually standing in.
And that’s when I realized something.
He had told me that we could still be friends.
That he could go back to the friendship.
And maybe he can.
But I realized that isn’t actually what I’m grieving.
I’m not grieving my inability to return.
I’m grieving the fact that the friendship I remember isn’t there anymore.
And those are two very different things.
Because you can return to an address without returning to the home you left.
It’s like moving out of a house and coming back later.
The address is the same.
The property is still there.
But the house you knew is gone.
Maybe there’s another house standing in its place.
Maybe it’s beautiful.
Maybe it’s functional.
Maybe somebody else could walk into it and call it home.
But you know it isn’t the house you left.
That’s how this feels.
There may still be communication.
There may still be kindness.
There may still be familiarity.
There may even be some form of connection.
But it isn’t the same friendship.
And I think that’s what I’ve been trying to understand.
History isn’t the same thing as foundation.
We had history.
Years of it.
But history doesn’t automatically mean that the foundation is still intact.
Sometimes people can know each other for years and still have to rebuild trust after something changes.
And I think I thought there was enough between us.
Enough history.
Enough friendship.
Enough understanding.
Enough skin in the game.
I thought there was enough there that whatever happened between us wouldn’t destroy the trust underneath it.
But it did.
At least for me, it did.
And I’m not saying that to blame anybody.
I’m saying it because I’m finally being honest about what changed inside of me.
Because once trust changes, you can’t just call the relationship by its old name and expect it to feel the same.
You can call it friendship.
You can say, “I can go back.”
But going back isn’t really going back when the person returning isn’t the same person who left.
And I’m not the same person.
I know things now that I didn’t know before.
I experienced things I hadn’t experienced before.
I allowed myself to become vulnerable in ways I don’t easily allow.
And I can’t unknow any of that.
So maybe there isn’t a friendship to return to.
Maybe there is only whatever comes next.
And I don’t know what that is.
I don’t know if anything comes next.
I don’t know if this is temporary.
I don’t know if this is permanent.
I don’t know if one day we’ll look at this differently.
I don’t know.
But I do know that I don’t want to keep trying to force something back into the shape it used to have just because that shape was familiar.
Because sometimes the most honest thing you can admit is:
The old thing is gone.
That doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.
It doesn’t mean it didn’t matter.
It doesn’t mean the good parts weren’t good.
It doesn’t mean the friendship was fake.
It means something happened.
Something changed.
And now I’m standing in the middle of that change, trying to figure out who I am on the other side of it.
And maybe that’s what The Sovereign Shift really is.
Not knowing how to let go.
Not knowing how to move on.
Not having some perfect answer about what a person means to you.
But being willing to tell the truth when the truth changes.
Because when I wrote this, I knew I didn’t want to just be his friend.
Now I know something else.
I don’t want to pretend that the friendship we had is still sitting there waiting for me to return to it.
It isn’t.
There may be another house someday.
There may not be.
But I’m not going to stand in front of the ruins of the old one and convince myself it’s still standing just because I miss it.
I miss it.
That’s true.
I loved parts of it.
That’s true too.
And I don’t have to stop loving what it was in order to accept that it isn’t what it was anymore.
I still don’t have the solution.
I’m still not writing from the other side.
I’m still in it.
Still feeling.
Still questioning.
Still learning.
And maybe I’m beginning to understand that I don’t need to know what comes next to acknowledge what has already changed.
Maybe I can grieve the house.
Maybe I can miss the house.
Maybe I can even wish I could walk back inside.
And still accept that I’m not living there anymore.
Because somewhere out there, there is another person sitting in their own uncertainty, convinced that they have to have the answer before they’re allowed to speak.
Maybe they’ll find this.
Maybe they’ll read these words and recognize themselves.
Maybe they’ll realize that healing doesn’t always look like knowing what to do.
Sometimes healing looks like sitting in the middle of the fucking unknown and refusing to lie to yourself about what you feel.
I don’t know the solution.
I’m not writing this because I’ve figured it out.
I’m writing it because I’m still here.
Still feeling.
Still questioning.
Still crying.
Still trying to understand what this means.
And maybe that’s where I am right now.
Not at the answer.
Just at the truth.
And maybe, for right now, that’s enough.
💜
The Sovereign Shift
Real thoughts. Raw truths. A higher you. ✨