The Space Between Who You Were…

…& Who You Are Becoming

Why life transitions can leave us feeling lost — and why finding our way again may take longer than we expect.

There are periods in life when something has clearly ended, yet nothing has emerged to take its place. Sometimes the rupture is unmistakable — an illness, a separation, the loss of a job, burnout, menopause, children leaving home — while at other times there is no single event to point to. The life we have built may simply cease to feel like one we can continue to inhabit in quite the same way. We know that something has changed, but we cannot yet say what this change means or where it is leading us.

We tend to speak about these periods as transitions, a word that suggests movement from one identifiable place to another. Yet profound transitions are rarely so orderly. What lies between the life we knew and whatever may follow can last months or sometimes years, and the difficulty is not simply that we do not know what to do next. The identities, roles and certainties through which we recognised ourselves may also have begun to loosen.

This is perhaps one of the least acknowledged aspects of major life change: circumstances can alter relatively quickly, while the inner structures that have organised a life take much longer to come undone.

When our place in the world becomes uncertain

Work is one of the clearest examples. In many societies, what we do is so closely connected with who we are that we barely notice the relationship until it is disrupted. Our work provides income and structure, but it also locates us within a collective world. It gives us routines, relationships, responsibilities and a readily available answer to one of the first questions we often ask when meeting somebody: “What do you do?”

When that answer disappears, particularly after illness or another involuntary interruption, something more complex than the loss of an occupation can occur. We may begin to wonder about our usefulness, our contribution and eventually our value. Who am I if I am not working? What am I contributing if I am no longer participating in the way I used to?

For women, these questions can extend far beyond paid work. Identity may have been organised around caring for others, being reliable, holding a family together, succeeding professionally or simply being the person who manages to keep going. When one of these ways of participating becomes impossible, unwanted or no longer sustainable, the resulting emptiness can expose how much our sense of worth had quietly become attached to what we were able to provide.

Knowing intellectually that human worth cannot be measured by productivity does not necessarily change this. Beliefs reinforced through decades of living are rarely dissolved by replacing them with a more compassionate sentence. They are embedded in how we have learned to recognise ourselves and our place among others.

The pressure to become recognisable again

There is also a social dimension to this experience which can be difficult to name because it often appears in the form of genuine concern. After a difficult period, family and friends naturally look for signs that we are recovering, and one of those signs may be the appearance of a new plan.

“So, what are you going to do now?”

“When do you think you might go back to work?”

“Have you thought about what comes next?”

There may be nothing unkind in these questions. On the contrary, they can arise from love and from the understandable wish to know that someone we care about is going to be all right. Yet they can also reveal how reassuring it is for all of us when a disrupted life begins to resemble a familiar one again. A job, a project or a clearly stated direction suggests that the crisis has passed and that the person we knew is returning to the shared rhythms of the world.

For the person living through the transition, however, recovery may not mean returning to the life that existed before it. Physical capacities may have changed, but so may priorities, desires, tolerances and the meaning attached to things that once seemed unquestionable. It is possible to be well enough to move forward while still having no desire — or no ability — to move back.

Remaining in this uncertain territory for long enough can produce a peculiar feeling of marginality. The world continues according to its familiar timetable while our own has become less legible. Other people work, make plans, progress in their careers and speak about the future in ways that once seemed ordinary. Standing outside those rhythms can gradually become uncomfortable, and the questions initially asked by other people can begin to sound increasingly like our own.

When guilt begins to make the plans

This is where uncertainty can turn into guilt. We may start to feel that we ought to have found an answer by now, that we should be doing more or contributing again, particularly when our circumstances allow us to see how far we have moved from the life we once considered normal.

The mind understandably tries to resolve this discomfort by constructing possibilities. Perhaps we could return to something similar to what we did before; perhaps we need another qualification, another job, another project; perhaps the solution is simply to try harder. None of these possibilities is inherently misguided. The desire to work, create, earn money and contribute to collective life is real, and practical or financial necessities do not disappear simply because an inner transformation is taking place.

What may be harder to discern is whether we are moving towards something because it has genuinely begun to call us, or because remaining where we are has become unbearable. Often, of course, both are present.

A new project can look like movement while also being an attempt to restore an old sense of legitimacy. It can reassure our family, reassure the people around us and, perhaps most powerfully, reassure us that we are once again useful. Yet if we move too quickly, we may find ourselves reconstructing, under a different name, precisely the structure from which life was beginning to separate us.

Allowing an identity to come undone

Contemporary language around difficult life experiences places considerable emphasis on rebuilding, resilience and reinvention. These ideas can be valuable, but they may encourage us to imagine transformation as a construction project: something has been damaged, therefore our task is to build the next version as efficiently as possible.

There are times, however, when reconstruction cannot begin with building. It begins with allowing something to fall away.

Photo by MART PRODUCTION

Psychosynthesis, the psychological approach developed by Italian psychiatrist Roberto Assagioli, offers a useful perspective through its concept of disidentification. We inevitably identify ourselves with particular roles, capacities, emotions and stories: the professional, the mother, the carer, the successful person, the strong one, the person who can always manage. These identities are not false; they are genuine expressions of our lives. The difficulty comes when one of them becomes so closely associated with who we are that losing it feels like losing ourselves.

A major transition can impose a form of disidentification long before we would have chosen it. A body changes and the identity built around what that body could do becomes uncertain. A career ends and the professional self that organised decades of life suddenly has nowhere to go. A relationship disappears and with it the future around which a sense of self had been constructed.

Such processes take time because what is changing is not merely a circumstance. Sometimes an entire internal system of value, belonging and security has to loosen before we can recognise what might genuinely take its place.

A map that does not tell us where to go

This is one of the reasons I am interested in astrology as a symbolic and psychological practice rather than a predictive one. During periods of uncertainty, the temptation to ask when things will improve or what will happen next is entirely understandable. Yet prediction can sometimes answer too quickly the very uncertainty that may need to be lived for a while.

A natal chart can instead be approached as a symbolic map of the tensions, needs, contradictions and possibilities that accompany a person throughout life. Astrological cycles can provide a wider context for periods in which particular dimensions of that life are being questioned or reorganised. Used in this way, astrology does not decide what someone should become, nor does it remove the discomfort of not knowing. It offers another language through which to explore what is happening.

The questions can then begin to change. Rather than asking only how to return to normal, we might wonder what our previous version of normal required from us. Instead of immediately searching for the next role, we might notice which identity we are so anxious to replace, or what is being relinquished alongside what is being sought.

For me, this is where symbolic work becomes particularly valuable. A useful map is not necessarily one that gives us the shortest route out. Sometimes it helps us understand the territory well enough to remain there without mistaking uncertainty for failure.

Photo by Johannes Plenio

The time between two lives

Eventually, transitions do lead to choices. Work may resume, new projects emerge, relationships change and different forms of contribution become possible. Remaining in an in-between state forever is neither necessary nor desirable. But there is a difference between allowing a new direction to acquire its own shape and constructing one primarily to escape the discomfort of having none.

Perhaps this is why some transformations take much longer than we expect. We are not simply waiting for the next chapter to begin; we may be slowly disentangling ourselves from assumptions about success, usefulness, belonging and identity that took decades to build.

This can be particularly difficult when the people around us are waiting, lovingly or anxiously, for evidence that we have returned. Yet becoming recognisable again is not necessarily the same as finding ourselves again. Sometimes the urgency to answer “What are you going to do next?” is precisely what needs to soften before a different question can emerge: not simply what should I do now, but how do I want to participate in life from here?

There may be no immediate answer, and perhaps there should not always be one. Some things need time to be built, but others need time to come undone. The space between who we were and who we are becoming may be where we slowly learn the difference.

Main – Photo by Vaidas Vaiciulis