Who Am I?

I’m in and out of a new life phase and I’m bordering on wondering if it includes a nervous breakdown… it’s got me thinking a lot lately about transitions, but probably not in the way most people think about them. It’s easy to recognize the obvious ones. We start a new job, move to a different city, become parents, watch our children grow up, lose people we love, retire, get married, get divorced, or begin rebuilding a life we never imagined we’d have to rebuild. Those are the moments everyone notices because they’re visible. They have names. They have dates attached to them. People celebrate them, mourn them, or ask us how they’re going.

What I’ve found myself thinking about isn’t the transition itself. It’s everything that comes afterward.

It’s the part where life quietly asks, “Who are you now?”

I don’t know that we talk about that question enough. Maybe it’s because there’s no clear answer, or maybe it’s because most of us feel like we should already know. Either way, I’ve realized that some of the hardest seasons of my life haven’t necessarily been the ones where everything was falling apart. Some of the hardest seasons have been the ones where life was changing in really good ways, yet I couldn’t quite figure out how to settle into the person those changes were asking me to become.

Over the last few years, I’ve found myself asking that question more than I expected. I stepped into the role of Clinical Director, and while I still spend time doing what I love most—sitting with people in their hardest moments as a therapist—I also spend my days leading clinicians, mentoring, making difficult decisions, and trying to help shape the culture of an entire practice. I love it. I genuinely do. But loving something doesn’t automatically mean you know who you are inside of it. Leadership asks something different of you than therapy does, and there are days when I still find myself wondering how to hold both roles well without feeling like I’m neglecting one in order to become the other.

At the same time, motherhood has quietly changed too. My children aren’t children anymore. Somewhere along the way they became adults with lives of their own, and now I’ve somehow become a grandma. I still don’t know how that happened. I don’t feel old enough to have a grandson, and yet I wouldn’t trade that role for anything. It’s funny how life can make something feel completely right while also making it feel completely unfamiliar. No one really tells you that parenting doesn’t end when your children grow up; it simply changes shape. You spend years learning how to raise them, and then one day you realize you’re learning how to love them differently because they don’t need you in the same ways they once did.

Then there’s Adventures In Change.

What started as an idea has slowly become something I can no longer imagine my life without. It isn’t just a website anymore. It isn’t just a place where I occasionally write down thoughts that have been floating around in my head. Somewhere along the way it became the place where all the different parts of me seem to meet. The therapist. The writer. The public speaker. The advocate. The woman who’s spent years trying to understand suffering. The person who’s still trying to understand her own life while helping other people understand theirs. The person determined to change the world. It’s becoming the place where I make sense of what it means to be human, both through my own experiences and through the privilege of walking alongside so many others in theirs.

And maybe that’s why this question keeps finding its way back to me.

Who am I becoming?

Not because I’m unhappy with where I am. Actually, it’s almost the opposite. I love the direction my life is heading. I love the work I’m doing. I love the dreams that are slowly becoming plans instead of possibilities. I can see pieces of the future coming together in ways I’ve hoped they would for a very long time. Yet somewhere in the middle of all of that excitement is the realization that every one of those dreams is asking me to become someone I’ve never been before.

I don’t think we give ourselves enough credit for how exhausting that can be.

We tend to think transitions are about learning new skills or adjusting to new routines, but I wonder if they’re actually about identity. Maybe that’s why they can feel so unsettling, even when they’re leading us somewhere we’ve desperately wanted to go. Every meaningful transition asks us to let go of a version of ourselves that once fit, even if we’ve outgrown it. It asks us to loosen our grip on identities that carried us faithfully through one chapter so we can discover who we’ll need to be in the next.

The strange thing is that I don’t think we recognize we’re grieving while this is happening. We associate grief with loss, but grief shows up anytime something meaningful comes to an end. Sometimes we’re grieving a season. Sometimes we’re grieving a role we’ve held for years. Sometimes we’re grieving routines we didn’t realize had become comforting. Sometimes we’re grieving a version of ourselves that no longer fits, even while we’re grateful for the person we’re becoming.

I see this in therapy all the time. Someone sits down and tells me about the change they’re living through, and somewhere in the conversation they quietly admit, “I don’t know why this has been so hard.” The circumstances are always different, but the question underneath is almost always the same. They assume their struggle means they’re doing something wrong. They assume that because the change is good, or necessary, or chosen, they shouldn’t be struggling to adjust.

I wonder what would happen if we stopped expecting ourselves to adapt overnight and started recognizing that becoming takes time.

When I look back over my own life, I can’t think of a single transition that felt comfortable while I was living it. Looking back, I can see how every season prepared me for the next one, but in the moment all I could see was what felt uncertain. Maybe that’s simply the nature of change. We rarely understand it while we’re standing in the middle of it. We understand it when we have enough distance to look back and recognize that while we were so busy wondering if we were losing ourselves, we were actually becoming someone new.

Maybe that’s where some of you find yourselves today.

Maybe you’re stepping into a role you’ve never held before. Maybe you’re trying to figure out who you are after your children have grown up, after a loss you never expected, after a career change, after retirement, after recovery, or after finally deciding to build the life you’ve always wanted. Maybe you’re carrying around the quiet belief that because this season feels unfamiliar, you must not be handling it very well.

I don’t think that’s true.

I think you’re doing what every human being has done since the beginning of time. You’re learning how to live inside a life you’ve never lived before, and that has never been a sign of weakness. It’s simply part of what it means to grow.

Maybe that’s what I’ve been learning too.

Maybe the question isn’t whether I’m becoming the right person.

Maybe it’s trusting that every season has been quietly shaping me into exactly who I’ll need to be for whatever comes next.

Reflection

What role or season of life are you still learning how to grow into? Instead of asking yourself whether you’re handling it well enough, maybe ask yourself a different question: Who is this season inviting me to become?