When Life Changes Your Role Without Warning
Written in 2019
Sometimes life changes our role without giving us time to prepare.
When that happens, it can feel as if the ground disappears beneath our feet.
We lose our balance.
Our direction.
Sometimes we even feel as though we've lost ourselves.
Even when we know a change is coming, it isn't easy.
Every new role comes with its own rules.
Its own expectations.
Its own way of thinking.
And before we can feel comfortable again, we need time to discover who we are in this new role.
Think about some of life's biggest transitions.
A newly married couple begins building a life together. Even if they have lived together before, marriage changes the relationship. The engagement is often their time to prepare.
An expectant mother has nine months to prepare for becoming a parent. She grows into the role long before the baby arrives.
Preparation doesn't remove the challenge.
It simply gives us time to adjust.
But what happens when life doesn't give us that time?
What happens when we suddenly lose our job?
Or lose a partner...
or a child...
without warning?
Our world can collapse overnight.
Shock.
Disbelief.
Fear.
The feeling that nothing is stable anymore.
Those are some of the hardest transitions we can experience.
I'll write about them another time.
Today I want to talk about the quieter transitions.
The ones that happen in almost every family,
yet often receive very little attention.
A young adult leaves home for college.
Almost overnight, life changes.
New responsibilities.
New expectations.
A completely different world.
Then comes graduation.
The structure disappears.
For the first time, many people have to discover where they belong and who they want to become.
Retirement is another powerful transition.
One day we are needed.
Busy.
Contributing.
Surrounded by people.
The next day...
our calendar is empty.
Many people don't miss the work itself.
They miss the role.
They miss belonging.
They miss knowing who they are.
These transitions are common.
Yet they can shake us deeply.
Some people even fall into depression because they never had the chance to prepare for the person they were becoming.
One of my clients was forced into early retirement.
She described it as losing her family.
Another felt completely disconnected after beginning college in a new city.
With support, both eventually found their place in their new lives.
Watching them taught me something important.
Every transition asks us to meet a new version of ourselves.
Around that same time, my own life was changing.
I wasn't replacing one role with another.
I was adding a new one.
Alongside my work as a breath therapist, I became a partner in a startup company.
The new role excited me.
It also frightened me.
It wasn't the responsibility that scared me.
As a therapist, I had already learned the weight of responsibility.
Helping people through emotional pain carries enormous responsibility.
What frightened me was something different.
Now I would be responsible for building a team.
For choosing people.
For trusting them to represent the values I believed in.
As the company grew,
so would the number of people carrying those values.
That thought kept me awake at night.
My mind never stopped working.
The quiet I had known disappeared.
I am happy to say that I didn't lose myself.
I didn't fall apart.
But I did lose my inner calm for a while.
What helped me was returning, again and again, to the present moment.
To my breath.
To my body.
To curiosity instead of fear.
As a therapist, this is exactly what I help other people do.
Not simply to change their thinking,
but to loosen the grip of automatic fear.
To become curious about the life waiting for them.
Because every new role asks the same question:
Will fear introduce you...
Or will curiosity?
