My grandmother recently told me how she always freezes during the transition from fall to winter, but once winter is here she is fine. I took those words and pondered for quite some time, and I realized that this statement is true for many people with many different things in life. The transition is always hard; whether it be going from Fall to Winter, high school to college, or anything else that may change the course of your day to day life.

Most people go into a state of shock, physically or emotionally, and cannot find how to deal with the changes during the transition time. One of the hardest transitions in life happens when you lose a loved one that played an important role in your day-to-day life. A well-known way of this happening is usually death, but the most common and unthought-of way is through breakups in relationships.

Think about it, everyone has had a friendship go up in flames at some point, and at the beginning, you hardly know how to handle yourself without your best friend. This is the transition time – the hardest time for dealing with separation. You are used to spending every second of every day either talking to them or thinking about how amazing they are; now you must force yourself to be strangers, which doesn’t just come naturally. You must take the transition time to realize how you’re going to cope without them. You must change your everyday routine because of them.

You have to adjust in the same way you switch from light jackets to winter coats and slip-on shoes to boots. Instead, you’re switching from smiles in front of the person to straight faces, sharing everything that happens with them to make it a point that they don’t know what is going on in your life. The transitions are the hardest parts, and we all have to learn to cope with them, for better or for worse.