Starting Over Without Knowing What You're Starting

I was on a call with a group of friends the other day. Women I've known since I was six years old. We hadn't spoken in about two years. Life happened, the way it does. Parents passing. Kids growing up and out. Continents between us now instead of a bike ride.

What I love about this group is that our friendship keeps shifting shape with us. It doesn't stay one thing. So when we finally caught up, I wasn't surprised by the update on kids and parents and the general chaos of being a person. What surprised me was this... out of the six of us the were on the call, three had recently blown up some part of their life. New career. New country. New relationship - sometimes all of them at once! We laughed about how learning anything new after forty is brutal. Then we said our goodbyes.

I closed the laptop and went for a walk. The conversation didn't leave with the call. It sat with me the whole way, somewhere between my chest and my throat. And I kept turning the same question over. What is it about this particular stretch of life that has some of us packing up the familiar and walking straight into the unknown?

I know my own answer. Or at least a piece of it. At forty three, I left a comfortable job at my family's business, sold our house, and started over somewhere new. Because I couldn't take it anymore. I had built a lifestyle I could no longer sustain.

All that stuff in the world stopped working, it couldn't fill the space where peace was supposed to be. It couldn't distract me anymore, or hide the truth. The person I used to be was slowly suffocating and I felt like I was drowning. And the worst part? I had no one to blame but myself.

I tried to outwork my own self-doubt. I placed my worth on the work. And somewhere along the way, I became a stranger to myself.

Don't get me wrong. It has not been easy. Some days I still ask myself what I was thinking. I wouldn't trade it. Mostly because of who I've had to become to survive it, and who I'm still becoming. But let's not romanticize this, it's been hard in ways I didn't see coming, and I'm not finished yet.

Here's the part nobody warns you about - reinvention doesn't feel like stepping through an open door into a bright new room. It feels like standing in a dark hallway with one hand still on the old doorknob. Not fully in the new thing. Not fully out of the old one. Just there. In the in between. Holding on to both.

And that grip is the whole problem. We don't let go of the comfortable job or the big house or the relationship because we've stopped loving parts of it. We hold on because our nervous system was built for one job. Keep you safe. It doesn't know the difference between a genuinely dangerous unknown and a scary but necessary one. All it knows is the math it was built on. The Certainty of Misery, then the Misery of Uncertainty. We choose the misery we know over the uncertainty we don't. Every. Single. Time. Unless something in us finally says enough.

I call this stretch the messy middle. Not fully out of who you were. Not yet who you're becoming. Still holding on to the version of yourself that had it figured out, while some part of you is hungry for the wisdom that only comes from actually living through the not knowing. And here's the catch nobody likes to hear. You don't get wisdom without experience. You don't get experience without walking into the unknown. There's no shortcut around this one. No hack. No workaround. I've looked.

If you're in that hallway right now, one hand on the past and one reaching for something you can't quite see yet, you're not doing it wrong. You're not broken. You're not behind. You're exactly where this kind of change actually happens. It was never going to feel graceful on the way through. Nobody's reinvention looks like a highlight reel while it's happening. Mine certainly didn't.

Some people will call what you're doing reckless. Blowing up a perfectly good life. I've decided to call it leveling up instead, because that's closer to the truth of it. Either way, easy was never on the table. It takes courage to let go of a doorknob you've been holding for years. It takes trust to walk into a hallway with no guarantee of what's on the other side. And it takes something like grief to say goodbye to who you used to be, even when you're the one who chose to leave.

If there's one thing I've learned from my own hallway, it's this. You don't have to know what you're starting in order to start it. You just have to be willing to let go of one door before you can open the next. That's it. That's the whole terrifying, unglamorous truth of it.

If you're standing in your own version of this hallway and your body feels like it's stuck in fight or flight just from reading this, that's your nervous system doing exactly what it was built to do. Learning how to work with it instead of against it is a lot of what I teach. If you want somewhere to do that work alongside women who are in their own hallway right now, come join the Skool community. You don't have to walk through this one alone.