Change

I have been doing a series of talks for the month of September for a private group. It’s been a privilege to have a window into the active changes people in this group are experiencing and to walk with them through their changes. It has also been challenging and novel to be aware of and observe my response to my own changes. I wanted to share with you, some of the insights that have come about.

It’s easy to romanticize change as a fabulous reinvention. Sepia coloured montages about burning old journals, cutting your hair, moving to Paris. Actual change is gritty, sometimes unexpected and almost always involves disruption and assimilation. These are rarely cinematic, and most shifts are lived in slow motion. The truth about change, is that you’re still in the old life, still wearing its clothes, still speaking its language, yet deep down you’ve probably already left. This incongruity can be deeply disorienting, and it manifests as feeling like an outsider in your own life. Things just don’t seem to fit, you may feel disconcerted, irritable and uncomfortable in your own skin.

This is your surefire cue that YOU ARE changing. In its newness, it can feel lonely, yet strangely, it can also sometimes feel like a relief, when you connect with the truth that is you. Change doesn’t happen all at once. it’s not like one morning you wake up, stretch your arms, and announce, “right then, I’ve officially outgrown things”. It can be described as a quiet restlessness that creeps in at the edges until suddenly, everything that once fit, now feels itchy, too tight, no longer yours and eventually the realization that your life feels like someone else’s script. Change is truly a metamorphosis but it’s the process of change that’s the uncomfortable part because our brains crave certainty, we want a neat story that makes sense: the before, the after, act one and act two. Yet we know life is rarely that neat, and so sometimes one has to just stand in the doorway of your life for a while, holding both selves, waiting for the shift to settle.

Take note of your internal self-talk and self judgement. What are your perceptions regarding personal change? Does outgrowing mean failure, if a job or a friendship or even an identity no longer fits? Outgrowing means you listened closely to yourself. You have allowed yourself to expand, even when it was inconvenient. you listened to the voice within you. You honoured your internal itch. We’re meant to grow out of things. clothes, habits, jobs, relationships, even versions of ourselves, that we once fought so hard to become. Understand that it’s not failure. It’s aliveness, just doing its work.

Like the body quietly outgrowing itself and most of our cells replacing themselves every seven years, so it is with internal change, by the time we notice a life doesn’t fit, some part of us has already been remade for the next one. No one can prepare you for your response to change, whether it will be bittersweet or scary or how difficult it is to realise that you have changed.

So what do you do when you’re living inside a life you’ve already outgrown? Honesty - stop pretending it still fits. Admit, even just softly, that this season is over. The temptation is wanting to know what comes next. You don’t need to know what comes next. The only thing to do, is to stop forcing yourself back into the old shape. Transitions don’t necessarily demand grand gestures or huge plot twists like you think they ought to. They ask for small, steady choices. a gentler kind of goal setting, don’t get caught up in a spreadsheet of variables, rather focus on things that feel alive and aligned to who you are now. This could be a different way of dressing. different conversations and saying no to what once defined you.

Outgrowing doesn’t always mean abandoning, it can mean carrying forward the parts that still matter and gently setting down the ones that don’t. If you’re reading this and resonate with this, that maybe your friendships feel itchy, your goals feel borrowed, your routines no longer comfort you, maybe it means you are in the middle of a transition. You are outgrowing. and that is proof enough that you are alive. So, the work is not to rush into the next version. The work lies in noticing, allowing yourself to linger in the newly discovered version of you. To let yourself stand in your doorway for as long as it takes, to allow for this version of yourself to settle in and become home.