Raspberry Iced M

We love talking about what can happen in a year.

You can change your life in a year.
Get healthy.
Pay off debt.
Start a business.
Read the Bible.
Build better habits.
Heal.
Travel.
Fall in love.
Become someone completely different.

[Insert motivational quote here.]

And it’s true.

But there’s another side of a year nobody puts on a Pinterest board…

Never underestimate the damage a year can do either.

A year can wear you down.
Change the way you see people.
Make you suspicious of things you once trusted.
Teach your body to remain tense when nothing is happening.
Make isolation feel normal.
Turn temporary coping mechanisms into habits.
Make you forget what you were like before you started surviving.

And sometimes you don’t realize how much a year changed you until you’re standing on the other side of it.

Damage doesn’t always arrive dramatically.

Sometimes there’s an obvious moment – like death or a diagnosis or betrayal or divorce or some type of other loss. But sometimes the damage is quiet and gradual. One disappointing day followed by another. One night of overthinking…then another…then another. One relationship slowly deteriorating. One compromise turning into two or three. One bad decision requiring another bad decision to cover the first. And soon, you’ve neglected yourself for a month. Then six. Then twelve.

Nothing exploded. You simply looked up one day and realized that you don’t feel like yourself anymore.

And that is what makes slow damage so difficult to recognize. Death by a thousand cuts.

A year can teach you to live in survival mode. Which is both a blessing and a problem. We can adjust to almost anything.

Chaos.
Stress.
Conflict.
Loneliness.
Uncertainty.
Walking on eggshells.
Constantly waiting for the next bad thing.

And eventually, what once felt abnormal starts being normal. Which is necessary sometimes.

Survival mode exists for a reason…but we aren’t supposed to build a permanent home there.

A year can change the way you see yourself. Spend enough time being rejected and you may start believing you’re unwanted. Spend enough time being criticized and you may begin criticizing yourself before anyone else gets the chance. Spend enough time making mistakes and you may end up believing that you are the mistake. Spend enough time ashamed and shame starts sounding like your own voice. Spend enough time trying to prove yourself and at some point you forget that worth was never supposed to require an argument.

I failed becomes, “I’m a failure.”
I hurt someone becomes, “I only hurt people.”
Someone left becomes, “Everyone leaves.”
Rejection becomes, “I’m unlovable.”

And those conclusions can feel like wisdom because pain taught them to us.
But pain isn’t a reliable teacher.

A year can change your relationships. Pain rarely stays neatly contained inside the person experiencing it. It leaks. Into marriages, parenting, friendships, conversations, work, and even faith. I can be going through something genuinely painful and still behave poorly because of it.

Our pain deserves compassion – BUT – we are still responsible for our behavior.

Suffering doesn’t automatically make me a better person. Sometimes it makes me defensive. Reactive. Selfish. Controlling. Withdrawn. Dishonest. Desperate. Angry.

That doesn’t mean pain that permanently ruined my character. But healing requires being hoenst about what happened through us, not only what happened to us.

A year can make fear feel like wisdom. After enough disappointment, protecting yourself feels intelligent. Don’t trust too quickly. Don’t hope too much. Don’t get excited. Don’t let anyone too close. Expect the worst so it won’t hurt so much. Have a back up plan. Analyze everything. Don’t get caught off guard.

Fear can become very convincing when it wears the clothes of experience. And yes, experience should teach us. Wisdom remembers. It notices patterns. It establishes boundaries. But wisdom and fear are not identical. Wisdom protects you while allowing you to live. Fear eventually prevents you from living at all.

A year can create habits you never intended to keep. Nobody decides that they’re going to develop unhealthy coping mechanisms. People just want relief. A quiet mind. A distraction. Something that makes tonight easier. Shopping. Eating. Drinking. Scrolling. Sleeping. Working. Avoiding. Seeking attention, reassurance, affection. Staying busy. Anything that gives us a few minutes when we don’t have to feel what we’re feeling.

And I have more compassion for that now. People reach for relief when they’re hurting. But temporary relief can become quiet dependency. And eventually, the thing used to survive a bad day becomes something I automatically reach for on an ordinary Tuesday. Which is sort of how I got here in the first place.

A year can damage your faith. I don’t necessarily mean losing faith. Sometimes the damage is more subtle. You still believe in God. Still pray. Still go to church. Still know the Word. But somewhere underneath all of that is, “Why did you let this happen? Where were You? Why didn’t You answer? Why did You let me lose this? Why are You taking so long?“

Those questions don’t scare God, and honestly, I think pretending we don’t have them can be more damaging than bringing them honestly to Him. So many nights this past year, I wanted Him to explain Himself…because I thought that answers meant understanding, and understanding meant clarity, and clarity meant control.

But isn’t that the whole point of having faith? Not that we trust God because we understand what He’s doing, but that we trust Him even when we have no clue what is going on.

A year can make you forget what is still good. Pain is greedy. It wants the whole story. Something goes wrong in one area of life and suddenly everything feels wrong. We pick the one relationship that is broken and decide we’re unloved. One dream falls apart and the future is hopeless. One person rejects us, and the ten people who stayed get overlooked. One unanswered prayer becomes evidence that He isn’t listening.

Pain narrows our vision. And sometimes surviving a difficult year requires intention when looking at the whole picture. Gratitude doesn’t erase grief. It just refuses to let grief become the entire landscape.

Sometimes the damage is what finally makes us change. I wish I could say I have always changed because wisdom politely suggested it. But that isn’t true.

It seems I am only capable of learning lessons one way – the hard one.

Sometimes consequences have to become uncomfortable enough.
Sometimes I had to get tired of myself.
Sometimes something inside me had to break.
Sometimes I had to finally see where a road was headed before I was willing to get off of it.

I don’t believe everything painful happens because God is teaching us a lesson. But I do think He is extraordinarily good at taking things He never called good and refusing to let them remain useless.

And a year ago, that’s exactly what happened. To me. I took a look at the mess I had made of my life and decided enough was enough. For no reason except that I found myself unable/unwilling to look at my own reflection without hating the person looking back at me.

And nothing reset magically. I don’t think I was prepared for the amount of work that healing would involve, especially because healing does not automatically erase damage. So I have had to learn that God can redeem something while I still grieve what is cost. He can grow something beautiful in ground that was genuinely devastated, even if that beauty doesn’t negate the fact that the devastation was real.

So if a year can do that much damage…

…image what another year can do.

Tiny choices can accumulated into damage.
And different tiny choices can add up to healing.

One boundary. One honest conversation. One therapy appointment. One prayer. One walk. One apology. One decision not to send the text. One night choosing sleep instead of spiraling. One time telling the truth when lying would be easier. One time sitting with an uncomfortable feeling instead of immediately reaching for a way to escape it.

And then one day a year from now, or five years from now, maybe I can look at my reflection without hating it. Maybe I’ll feel like myself again…or better yet…maybe I’ll feel like someone I haven’t even met yet. Because if I can be changed, over time, by hard things…then I can also be changed, over time, by good things. And perhaps this time next year, I’ll have made enough tiny good decisions to turn the needle in a positive direction. And if that is the case…if I can keep this up…I can’t wait to meet 45 year old Me.