Why Growth Never Feels Like Growth
There’s a strange thing about growth: it rarely feels like growth when you’re in the middle of it. Learning something new almost always starts with a sting. The first attempts at a language, a skill, a discipline fumbling through rules you can’t untangle, watching others make it look so easy while it leaves you feeling slow, clumsy, even dumb.
But stay with it long enough, and that same experience transforms into wisdom. What felt like humiliation becomes humility, and humility is the soil where mastery takes root. It’s no different in the body. Step into the gym after time away and the weights remind you of your weakness. Muscles tremble, breath falters, and everything in you wants to quit. Yet paradoxically, that weakness signals that strength is already being built. The breakdown is part of the process, the sore reminder that new capacity is forming just out of sight.
The truth is that becoming is messy. Who you were doesn’t vanish cleanly; they linger, tugging on your sleeve, asking why you’d change what was already familiar. To move forward, you have to make room sometimes by letting go of stories that once served you but no longer fit. That discomfort isn’t failure, it’s friction. And friction is where transformation lives. Maybe the mistake is believing that growth has a finish line that once we “arrive,” the questions stop, the struggles ease, and the pieces settle into place. But life rarely works that way.
Most of us live in the middle, always shedding something, always reaching toward something else. The paradox isn’t a problem to solve; it’s the condition of being human. So perhaps the real invitation is this: stop searching for the clean edges of completion, be kind to yourself, and learn to stand comfortably in the middle of becoming. To accept the weakness before strength, the foolishness before wisdom, the confusion before clarity. Because it’s there in the stretch, in the tension, in the half-formed space between who you were and who you’re becoming that life is most alive.
Life is lived,
Willy