On navigating transitional times

Going through changes? Me too

May 26, 2024

Do you ever feel like something isn’t quite right, but you cant pinpoint what?

Objectively, your life is great. You have lots of loving relationships. An interesting job. Financial security. Nice holidays. Maybe you’re getting closer to the thing you’ve been working towards for years. Maybe you’re already there.

And whether it’s through therapy, coaching, meditation, or simply having a few good podcasts/voice noting friends on rotation, you’ve done enough reflecting to finally figure yourself out.

Or so you thought…

Welcome to the funk

I started this year on a high. Ringing in 2024 in the flat I share with my boyfriend (a sentence that, given my track record with dating and relationships, still feels miraculous to write), surrounded by raucous gaggle of friends and family. Full of beans about my new path as a coach, comfortable in the stability of my copywriting career, and grateful for the people I hold close. My outlook was hopeful. I felt at peace.

But in the past few months, something has shifted.

I’ve been in a certified funk. Where I don’t necessarily feel terrible, I just don’t feel like me. As though someone has hit the dimmer switch on my spark.

The funk has been manifesting in my body, as something that feels like stress. I clench my jaw in my sleep and wake up with a dull pressure in my temples. My shoulders are tense. I’ve even been getting weird visual distortions that doctors and opticians are baffled by (hmu if you know anything about unexplained metamorphopsia and can save me from turgid NIH papers/Reddit rabbit warrens).

Clearly, my body knows something is up. But I haven’t known “stress” like this before. In the past, I’ve always been able to identify obvious triggers; a demanding job, a nightmare boss, or an angsty breakup. Whereas now, I’m struggling to name a single source—just a base level of unease, perhaps.

So where’s it all coming from?

The roots of my meh-ness

Fortunately, I’ve had ample space and time to pore over my feelings and get to the bottom of my meh-ness.

As part of my coaching qualification, I’ve been doing lots of reciprocal swaps with other trainees. With the help of a small army of kind, attentive listeners, I managed to unearth a few roots.

There was a piece around relationships, boundaries and reciprocity. A daily battle with time and feeling like there’s never enough of it. A common thread about values. A possibility of burnout (a reminder that even the good, exciting kind of stress can play havoc with our nervous systems).

But what resonated the most was something that felt a lot broader, which perhaps explained why my malaise was of the more general kind.

Ch-ch-changes

It occurred to me that I’m slap bang in the middle of a lot of big transitions. Whichever way you look at it, things in my life are changing.

I’ve started a new decade.

I’ve been learning a new skill.

I’m exploring a new career path.

I’m living with a (wonderful) boy for the first time.

Pretty soon, we’ll be moving out of London.

All around me, my friends are also moving, as life pulls us in vastly different directions. Some literally, to different countries. Some honing their craft in challenging careers or impressive hobbies. One growing a whole new person!

Meanwhile, I have birthed this Substack (lol).

I’ve made it through my Saturn Return (iykyk).

I’ve finally started taking supplements.

I’ve grown around the grief of losing my dad and I’m learning ways to live without him. Or, more accurately, still live with him.

Perhaps that’s why the decision to sell his home—another milestone—has been more emotional than I anticipated.

When everything is changing, we can’t expect to feel the same

I’m changing. So is everyone around me. And while I never really liked Keane, maybe they had a point.

I’ve written at length about times of change. How we wrestle with and welcome endings and beginnings. How both on a personal and macro level, we rarely give ourselves enough grace to grieve those endings. Launching ourselves headfirst into the next thing without honouring the place, the job, or the person we’ve left behind.

Ultimately, that person is ourself. The version of us who was satisfied by that career, happy in that relationship, or still had their mum or dad.

Talking to my coach of three years (for whom I reserve the most extreme gut-spilling), we played with different metaphors to describe this period of transition: the limbo between who we were and who we are yet to become.

I imagined a caterpillar, small and ugly in its cocoon. She imagined shrugging off a coat that no longer fits. I thought of snakes shedding their skin. And then I remembered something I’d read a few days before, which had stuck with me (I think it was via

Emma Gannon

That growing older is less of a sophisticated, seamless maturation, and more like giving birth to our adult selves.

Transitions aren’t meant to be easy

Real change rarely comes as an overnight transformation or a beautiful metamorphosis. More often than not, it’s painful, long and messy. And a bit like the bear hunt, you can’t skip fast-forward; you simply have to go through it.

So when I wrote the title of this post, I hovered over the “how to” at the beginning. Unlike my last post, I’ve got no next steps or actionable tips. Just the recognition that this is (ironically, given the very title of this newsletter) the messy work of life. And sometimes all we can do is acknowledge the changes and trust the birthing process.

If you’re feeling something similar, what I can tell you is that it’s helped to write all of this down, and talk it through with that small army of coaches and loved ones. Just seeing that big ol’ list of big ol’ changes made me appreciate the shift that’s happening in my life and identity. Reminding me that in transitional times, we are often at our most vulnerable—and actually, there is a lot of beauty in that.

Time to reflect

A certain lovely friend recently asked me for some journalling prompts. So I’ll end by sharing some some questions that have been guiding some of my own reflection.

Journalling (or just thinking) prompts for transitional times

Where have you come from?

Where are you going?

What would you like to appreciate yourself for in this journey? How?

How could you be more gentle with yourself during this time?

How might you honour your vulnerability?

What needs to be grieved?

What else needs to be grieved?

What gives you hope?

What else gives you hope?

And finally, how might you commemorate or celebrate the birth of the new you?

Let me know your thoughts and metaphors

Are you going through changes? How does it feel? As always, if any of this post has resonated, I’d love to hear from you in the comments. Or you might like to forward it to a friend navigating a transition.