I don’t revisit old seasons.
But I do respect them.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how often we’re told that growth means leaving everything behind. The people. The memories. The versions of ourselves that existed before clarity, before healing, before alignment. As if BECOMING requires erasing.
I don’t believe that. Not for one second. I’m a firm believer that when you forget where you come from slightly diminishes the appreciation of where you have grown to be.
The seasons I’ve lived through span middle school, high school, college, and into adulthood. And while each season brought its own lessons, I had the same friends walking alongside me through many of them. We grew up together in real time. Making mistakes. Figuring out who we were. Learning ourselves individually while also learning the dynamic of the sisterhood we were building together.
Those friendships gave me a sense of safety and acceptance. I felt seen. I felt like I belonged. We were growing up together, learning life together, and forming bonds that felt unbreakable in those moments. It wasn’t perfection, but it was real to me. And that mattered.
When I look back, I think about the late nights and three-way phone calls that lasted for hours. The spontaneous moments of hopping in the car with no real destination. Windows down. Music up. Riding the highway with nothing but time and freedom ahead of us. I think about road trips to Atlanta, the laughter, the inside jokes, the sign language in the middle of a crowded room that only we knew, the feeling that nothing else in the world mattered as long as we were together.
There were nights we laughed until the sun came up. Laughed until we cried. Moments where time stood still and everything felt light. Those memories live with me still. Not because I want to return to those seasons, but because they shaped me. They remind me of who I was, who I was becoming, and the joy that existed in those chapters of my life.
The versions of me in those seasons didn’t have clarity yet. Not the kind of clarity that forces you to sit with hard distinctions. Seasonal or forever. The kind of clarity that comes with the unspoken grief of watching what you believed would last always slowly reveal itself as temporary.
It was the clarity that came with realizing that who I was in that season no longer fit the becoming of who I was meant to be.
We talk about growing pains as if they stop after adolescence. As if they only belong to puberty and awkward transitions. But growing pains don’t end there. They evolve.
For me, growing pains in adulthood looked like growing without people I thought would always be there. It looked like growing into a woman I never saw coming. It looked like becoming everything God planned for me, and choosing obedience even when it required release.
There are many kinds of growing pains.
And I honor them all.
