Can People Really Change? What I Learned in the Pause Before Responding

I used to believe that people don’t really change. They learn better language. They become more socially acceptable versions of themselves. They suppress certain behaviors and develop others. But somewhere underneath it all, I thought, the machinery remained basically the same.

I’m not as sure anymore. The last twenty-four hours have been strange enough that I still don’t know what to make of them. Some of it was painfully ordinary: conflict, work, money, disappointment, silence. Some of it was harder to explain. There were moments that felt guided, an unexpected human connection, and a dream that brought back a part of myself I had barely heard from in years. Inside all of that, I noticed something else: I had changed.

Not completely. Not heroically. I was still angry, hurt, exhausted, and capable of thinking things I would probably regret saying aloud. Loving Awareness, I’m learning, does not mean becoming so spiritually polished that nothing bothers me. Maybe it means noticing what happens next.

Learning to Respond Instead of React

A relationship from my past resurfaced recently. There is history there—some generous and loving, some painful. A message activated almost everything at once: anger, defensiveness, old grievances, the urge to explain myself, and the urge to make sure my side was finally understood.

I recognized the emotional pattern immediately. What surprised me was recognizing myself in it. There were ways the other person responded that reminded me of ways I have responded when wounded. Different circumstances, different language, but I knew the emotional energy underneath it because I have carried it too.

That did not make my hurt disappear. It did not erase responsibility or require me to reopen a relationship I no longer believe is healthy for me. But it changed the question. Instead of asking, “How do I make this person understand what they did?” I found myself asking, “Who do I want to be in my response?”

I wrote an email and did not send it. I set a harder boundary, then gave myself twenty-four hours before doing anything else. Years ago, I might have called that avoidance. Now I think it may have been discernment.

What Feeling Invisible Can Do to You

All of this was happening against a much larger backdrop of feeling invisible. I have spent years building Aurelda: books, art, a website, audio, video, a podcast, Patreon, Substack, and more. Yet much of it has been met with silence. Very few readers. Very few sales. Almost no comments. Work opportunities disappear. Proposals go nowhere. Sometimes I no longer know what the silence means.

Then I walked into a café where a book reading and signing was happening, and my first thought was immediate: It should be me.

That hurt, not because I begrudged the author sitting there. I didn’t. It hurt because, for a moment, I was standing physically inside a version of the life I want: books on a table, people gathered, someone reading words aloud while other human beings listened. I wanted to cry. I felt very small and very invisible.

What Happened When I Stopped Trying to Solve Everything

The rest of the day became harder to describe without flattening it. A ride with a stranger unexpectedly became a moment of real human connection. Music was playing. There were tears. A hand reached toward another hand. Assumptions I had formed about someone dissolved almost as quickly as they had appeared.

Later I listened to Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. Eventually I stopped trying to solve anything, put the phone down, and returned to my breath. Then I slept.

In the dream, I was teaching again. Not writing books, building websites, producing content, or optimizing anything. I was teaching breath.

I told people to shake, to surrender enough to look a little foolish, to move left and right, forward and back, until they could feel where center was. Then to straighten the spine, place one hand over the heart and one over the belly, breathe in, and breathe out longer.

That’s it.

When I woke, there was an intense heat in the center of my body. It did not feel like ordinary sweating. It felt like punctuation. Somewhere in that half-awake space was an insistence: get up, record this, don’t lose it.

I also felt Mo’an there. What that means, I still don’t know. Sometimes I experience Mo’an as a character I created. Sometimes as something I encountered. Sometimes the distinction stops feeling important.

I do not need to turn that experience into proof. I only know that I listened.

Can People Really Change?

That may be where all of this connects back to Aurelda. I have spent years writing about remembering. I once thought remembering meant returning to some purer version of ourselves from before pain, grief, shame, disappointment, or all the things that taught us to protect ourselves.

I don’t think that anymore. We cannot return to the person who had not yet been hurt. Maybe remembering is returning to ourselves with everything that happened still included.

The anger is still there. The grief is still there. Mila, my golden retriever, is still gone. Financial fear is real. The silence around Aurelda still hurts. I still want readers. I still want meaningful work. I still want intimacy, companionship, recognition, laughter, and enough money to live rather than merely survive.

Loving Awareness does not require me to pretend otherwise. But perhaps something has changed if I can feel all of that without immediately handing it the steering wheel. Perhaps change happens in the tiny interval between activation and action.

A boundary can be loving. Silence can sometimes be wiser than the perfect rebuttal. Understanding another person’s pain does not require abandoning my own. Compassion and distance can occupy the same body.

And perhaps remembering is not discovering that I was secretly untouched all along. Maybe it is realizing that after everything, I am still here—and that I have more choice about who I become next than I once believed.

I used to think people didn’t change. Today, I’m not so certain, and for the first time in a while, that uncertainty feels hopeful.

If you want to see where this idea of remembering became a story, you can begin with Chapter One of The Aurelda Chronicles, free on Patreon at AureldaSoul.com. Read Chapter One Free »