What Change Asks of Us

“Change is not given to us. It’s demanded of us.”

— Gloria Steinem

I have never loved the language of fresh starts. It is too clean, too performative, too invested in optimism as proof that everything will work out.

Real change rarely feels like a gift. It arrives as pressure. As insistence. As the moment when the life you built stops cooperating with the version of you who built it. It is not celebratory. It is clarifying.

That is what this week tends to reveal.

The end of the year is not only a calendar shift. It is a mirror. It shows you what has been working, what has been tolerated, and what has quietly been outgrown. It shows you where you have been maintaining instead of living, preserving instead of choosing.

Steinem’s line lands because it refuses to soften the truth. Change is not handed to us neatly wrapped. It is not offered on our terms. It arrives as a demand.

Sometimes that demand is for honesty. Sometimes it is for rest. Sometimes it is for a boundary you have been avoiding or a truth you have been negotiating away. Often, it is a demand to stop performing the life you are supposed to want.

Many women feel this demand most intensely in the space between years. Not because January holds magic, but because the noise softens long enough for truth to surface. You begin to notice what feels tight, what feels heavy, what feels misaligned. You notice the habits you keep out of fear, the roles you maintain out of loyalty to an older identity, the exhaustion you’ve mistaken for normal.

None of this needs to be labeled as a crisis. It does not require narration or resolution language. It does not ask to be fixed immediately. It asks to be acknowledged.

The demand itself is rarely dramatic. It is often very simple.

It asks you to stop abandoning yourself for stability.

It asks you to stop shrinking to keep things intact.

It asks you to stop treating exhaustion as a personality trait.

It asks you to stop outsourcing your life to other people’s expectations.

If you feel tension right now, it is not because you are failing. It is because you are listening.

There is strength in letting a year end without turning it into a performance, without declarations, and without reinvention theater. Without the need to explain what comes next. There is strength in clarity without urgency, in recognition without spectacle.

If change is demanding something of you as this year closes, let it demand your attention, courage, and your truth.