The Naming of Change

We scare people away when we call change hard.
Hard sounds like a wall.
Hard sounds like something you bang your head against until you bleed.
But call change challenging—and suddenly it becomes something you can step into, wrestle with, learn from.
Challenge invites. Hard rejects.

It isn’t that change is impossible.
It’s that change asks you to name what you feel as it moves through you.
And that naming—that’s where we stumble.

If you call yourself angry,
you’ll burn everything in your path.
But what if the heat is really fear?
Fear of losing control. Fear of not being enough. Fear of being seen.

If you call yourself tired,
you might collapse on the couch, bury in blankets, scroll into numbness.
But maybe you aren’t tired—you’re lonely.
And no amount of sleep fixes loneliness.

If you call yourself fine,
you’ll smile and keep going.
But maybe fine is really sadness, pressed flat,
hiding beneath a voice that doesn’t want to burden anyone.

Naming wrong is like reading the map upside down.
You’ll wander the wrong roads, wondering why you never arrive.

But if you pause—
if you dig under the first word that rises,
you might find the truth tucked beneath:
Anger with sadness folded inside it.
Sadness wrapped in fear.
Fear softening into longing.

Change isn’t hard.
It’s layered.
And the work isn’t breaking through it—
it’s learning to peel back the names until you touch the real thing.