people change....because sometimes they have to

people don't change suddenly...they break first  

Sometimes life breaks you so deeply that you forget who you are. Every day starts to feel heavy. Your mind is full of stress, your heart is full of pain, and inside you there is a strange silence. Divorce, anxiety, stress… these are not just words. They slowly make a person empty from within.

Some people come into our lives and awaken the child inside us. They bring back our innocence, our happiness, and make us feel loved. They make us feel alive again. But we never imagine that the same people can one day take us away from ourselves.

While expecting love from someone else, we slowly start begging for it. What once was love turns into something that feels like asking for attention and care. Nights become sleepless, filled with thoughts — “What is happening to me?”

Even when we are in pain, we keep loving our partner. We give our 100%, and sometimes even more — we try to give their share of love too, just to fill the emptiness in the relationship. But in doing that, we start losing ourselves.

We try everything to make things work, but nothing feels enough. We fight for the relationship, yet we are the ones blamed. We compromise, we cry, and then we silence ourselves. We start doing things our self-respect would never allow before.

Slowly, we lose our confidence, our self-respect, and then… we lose ourselves.

The love also fades away.

The person from whom we once wanted all the happiness in life — now we only wish that they don’t insult us in front of others, don’t talk to us disrespectfully.

Where we once wanted to express our feelings freely, now we start wishing to avoid conversations — just so there is no fight, no drama, no humiliation.

As long as we stay quiet, we are “good.”

But inside, our soul keeps screaming. There is no peace. Every day feels like a mountain to climb. The person we once longed to be with… now we feel more peaceful staying away from them.

And one day, after all the fights, pain, and losing ourselves… we get tired.

We bury that love of ten years right there.

Because the truth is — it had already died long ago. We were just holding onto its shadow.

When we finally leave, people call us disloyal. Even that person asks,

“What happened suddenly? Why did you change? Why did you leave me?”

But they never saw how many times we broke, how many times we tried to fix ourselves. They never saw us falling apart, piece by piece.

They slowly separated us from ourselves. They took away our confidence, our self-respect, and even our ability to love ourselves.

And the truth is…

A person who loses themselves cannot truly love anyone else.

I left them…

Because while searching for them, I completely lost myself.