You’ve realized that you’re “bad with transitions.” That you’re “rigid.” That you need to “work on flexibility.” Some well-meaning therapist probably suggested you practice “sitting with uncertainty,” like uncertainty is a yoga pose you just haven’t mastered yet. Maybe you even got a late diagnosis eventually, autism, ADHD, AuDHD, PDA, and suddenly a dozen old memories reorganized themselves into evidence instead of character flaws. But the reframe still hadn’t fully landed yet, because knowing the label isn’t the same as understanding the mechanism.
Here’s the reframe that’s going to save you: you are not change-averse. You are consent-averse to change you had no hand in shaping.
Watch what actually happens.
You decide, unprompted, at 11pm on a Tuesday, to completely restructure your morning routine, quit your job, move to another city, or end a relationship that “everyone said was fine.” You do this with the calm, surgical precision of someone defusing a bomb. No spiral. No meltdown. Just clean, decisive action.
Then someone reschedules a meeting by fifteen minutes, and you feel like your skin is on backwards.
You will spend four hours color-coding a spreadsheet to plan your own layoff. But if your partner switches which side of the bed they sleep on without a conversation, you will lie awake at 2am reconstructing the entire relationship’s power dynamics.
This is data.
The Nervous System Doesn’t Fear the New. It Fears the Unmapped.
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