Even Good Change is Stressful

This week, I took my youngest to get her driver’s license, moved my oldest out of her college apartment, celebrated my middle setting a date to move into his first apartment, and I sold the home we’ve been living in for 8 years.

Objectively, these are all signs of forward progress. 

So why is my nervous system responding by acting like a raccoon on meth trapped in a garage?

Why do I want someone to hug me and tell me it’ll all be okay? 

I think we expect major life improvements to feel cinematic. Triumphant. Like the ending scene of a movie where everything suddenly makes sense and the soundtrack swells at exactly the right moment.

Right now it feels like: “Wtf did I do?”

A new house still means packing tape and logistics and 17,442 decisions. Financial progress still comes with responsibility, identity shifts, and an alarming number of tabs open. Moving forward still somehow manages to sit next to grief, exhaustion, and the occasional desire to be emotionally supervised for like… fifteen minutes.

Nobody tells you that your nervous system doesn’t really distinguish between bad change and big change at first.

It just knows everything is different.

And right now, everything is very different.

I'm finding a strange surrealness to major milestones post divorce. Not because I'm not grateful. Not because I want my old life back. But because there’s a version of me that spent so long surviving, striving, planning, bracing, and building that finally arriving somewhere I never planned to go feels weird.

I made the hard decisions.
I handled the paperwork.
I moved things forward.

I sold the house.

Part of me still seems to be wandering around internally holding a clipboard asking,
“but are we okay?”

Things I'm focusing on:

• Change is exciting. Change is hard. Both things can be true.
• Disorientation is not the same thing as failure.
• Fear doesn't mean you've made the wrong choice.