Maybe She Changed

In 2024, I burned out. Mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually. The full set.

There’s a lot of language out there about getting back to yourself. Come home to yourself. Remember who you are. Find yourself again. Get back into alignment. Reclaim the woman you were before everything got so hard.

I understand why that language appeals to people. I’m just not sure it’s always true.

Some losses change us. Not temporarily. Not in some dramatic phoenix-rising-from-the-ashes way. They just rearrange the landscape enough that the person who comes out the other side isn’t exactly the person who went in.

That doesn’t automatically mean something has gone wrong.

Afterward, I didn’t always want the same things. My tolerance changed. My relationships with people changed. My energy changed. Things that once mattered deeply became strangely irrelevant, and things I’d ignored for years became much more important.

For a while, it’s easy to read those changes as proof that you’ve lost yourself.

But which self are we talking about? The one before the burnout? Before the death, the divorce, the body changing? Before you learned something you couldn’t unknow?

Why is that earlier version automatically the authentic one?

Human Design has its own version of this. It’s called deconditioning: the idea that you shed everyone else’s influence and return to who you were designed to be. There’s real value in that. There’s also a trap, because it’s very easy to slide from “who I was designed to be” into “who I used to be,” as if they were the same woman.

The chart can help me recognize the parts of myself that still make sense inside the change. It can give me language for patterns I may already be living. What it can’t do is order me back into a former version of my life just because the chart stayed the same.

That’s where I think we have to be careful with all of our maps. A map can show continuity. It can also become a weapon, if we use it to argue with the person standing right in front of us.

Sometimes there is no getting back. Sometimes there’s only meeting the person who’s here now, without immediately assigning her a problem.

Maybe she isn’t lost.

Maybe she changed.