You're Not Lost. You're Between Versions of Yourself
And you're more on track than you think
When you’re healing and growing, there often comes a point where the way you’ve always done things stops working.
The strategies that used to help you make sense of things don’t bring the same clarity. The ways you used to navigate relationships don’t land the same way in your body. Even the habits and patterns that once gave you a sense of control or stability start to feel strained, like they’re no longer holding you in the same way.
And because they worked for so long… your instinct is to lean on them even more.
You try to think your way through things the way you always have. You try to respond the way you’ve learned to respond. You try to recreate a sense of steadiness by doing what used to feel familiar… only to end up feeling more disconnected, more unsure, sometimes even more overwhelmed.
That’s where it starts to feel disorienting. Because you don’t have anything solid to replace those ways of being yet. You don’t have new patterns that feel natural, or a clear sense of how to move differently. You can feel that something inside you has shifted, but you don’t yet know what that shift is asking of you in a practical, lived way.
Congratulations: you’re in the in-between where the old version of you is no longer fully accessible, but the new one hasn’t taken shape yet.
From the inside, it can feel a lot like something has gone wrong. It can feel like you’ve lost your clarity, or your direction, or your ability to handle things the way you used to.
But what if nothing has gone wrong here? What if this isn’t about losing your way, but about outgrowing it?
This Isn’t Lack of Direction
I still remember the first time I found myself in that in-between space.
Nothing in my life had clearly fallen apart, but the way I was moving through it no longer made sense to me. Something inside me was changing, and I could feel it, even if I didn’t understand it yet.
But let me tell you something we can’t always see when we’re in the thick of it: that disorientation isn’t a sign that you’ve lost direction. It’s a sign you’ve stopped moving on autopilot.
And that’s actually an amazing thing.
We all spend years learning how to move through the world in ways that keep things working. Ways that help us stay connected, avoid conflict, feel accepted, feel safe. Over time, those ways become so familiar that we stop noticing them altogether. They turn into default responses—the way we think things through, the way we relate, the way we make decisions—all happening quickly, almost automatically.
But that way of moving through life comes at a cost we don’t always see while we’re inside of it.
Because when everything is automatic, there isn’t much space to actually feel what something is like for you. There isn’t much space to notice whether something truly sits right, or whether you’re just used to it.
So, the fact that you’re feeling this disorientation… it means you’re creating that space. It means you’re starting to actually feel your way through your life, instead of just moving through it the way you always have.
You’re no longer following what’s already laid out. You’re starting to sense your own direction. You’re letting it take shape from within you.
Now tell me: isn’t that something to be proud of?
Isn’t that something that deserves more credit than you’ve been giving it?
It might not feel like it. It might feel messy, unclear, slower than you’d like. It might feel like you should have figured it out by now, like you’re behind, like you’ve lost something you used to have.
But look at what this actually requires of you:
To stay with yourself when things don’t immediately make sense.
To pause instead of rushing into what’s familiar.
To feel your way through decisions that don’t come with clear answers.
To let things be incomplete while something new is still forming.
To let yourself discover who you are beneath what you’ve learned.
That takes a kind of presence most people never allow themselves to develop.
But there you are, doing exactly that.
It’s much easier to follow what’s already known. To move in ways that are predictable, that keep things stable, that don’t require you to question too much or feel too deeply.
That path asks very little of you.
It lets you keep moving without having to fully meet yourself in what you’re doing. It keeps things smooth on the surface, even when something underneath isn’t fully aligned… And for a long time, that can feel like strength. Like clarity. Like knowing what you’re doing.
But there’s a difference between moving easily… and moving truthfully.
Moving truthfully doesn’t always look impressive from the outside. It doesn’t give you quick certainty or clean direction. It doesn’t always feel like progress in the way you’re used to measuring it.
But it’s real. And it’s easy to underestimate what that requires.
So if you’re in that space right now, give yourself more credit.
For the moments you pause instead of defaulting. For the times you listen, even when what you hear isn’t fully clear yet. For the way you’re learning to move without abandoning yourself, even when it would be easier to go back to what you’ve always done.
This isn’t you falling behind. This is you becoming more intentional in how you move.
And even if it still feels uncertain, even if it doesn’t yet feel solid… there is something deeply right about what you’re doing.
It’s just not as loud or obvious as you’ve been taught to expect.
Thank you for reading 🫶🏼
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Thank you for being here and for walking this path with me 🤍
Exactly what I needed to read. Thank you!
Ahhh ..this is so helpful in my weird never-ending in-between stage 🥴