The Cost and Gain of Alignment · AVA Collective- by SurinaJ

The Cost and Gain of Alignment

The 1 April has always been a big date for me personally- and not because it was April fool's😉.

Now even more than before.

You see this has always been my anniversary. I got married on this date and exactly 25 years later on the same date my divorce went through. Something I never would have imagined would happen to me... today exactly one year ago...

I made a life decision. The kind that comes from somewhere so deep inside you that you can't explain it to anyone — you just know.

I walked away from something that had been my life for 25 years. Something familiar. Something I had built my entire identity around. And from the outside, I'm sure it looked like chaos. Like loss. Like starting over.

But on the inside — even in the middle of all the uncertainty — something felt different to anything I'd ever felt before.

It felt aligned- I had to look it up to fully understand...

Alignment= When your decisions, actions and behaviour supports who you are choosing to become.

And that's the only word I have for it, even now. Not easy. Not painless. Not without cost or loss. But aligned.

Like for the first time in a long time, what I was choosing was actually reinforcing who I was becoming — not who I had been, not who people expected me to stay.

A year later, I have rebuilt. Not just my business, not just my circumstances — but me. Who I am. How I show up. What I believe I deserve. What I'm willing to settle for. All of it has shifted.

And I want you to know that I don't share this lightly. I share it because I know some of you are standing at your own version of that moment right now.

That quiet pull towards something that's true — even when it's terrifying.

Alignment will cost you something. It always does.

But what it gives you back is yourself.

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The Cost and Gain of Alignment