People who feel most lost aren’t always broken — sometimes they’re just between the person they were and the one they’re becoming

A few months after my daughter Emilia was born, I caught myself mid-sentence trying to describe what I did for work. It was a simple question from someone I had just met. But I stumbled over it in a way I hadn’t since I was a student figuring out my first steps. I knew the facts: I write, I work from home, I run my day with a precision I have always been proud of. But something about the answer felt hollow, like I was describing a version of myself I could no longer quite locate.

I had been sharp, driven, completely certain of who I was professionally. Then, almost overnight, I was also someone’s mother. And those two things didn’t fit together the way I expected them to.

I wasn’t depressed. I wasn’t struggling in any clinical sense. But I was disoriented in a way that felt uncomfortable to admit. What was wrong with me? Why didn’t I recognize myself anymore?

What if the answer is that nothing was wrong? What if that disorientation isn’t a glitch, but a sign?

When someone you used to be disappears

There’s a version of you that exists for each season of life. You build that version slowly, out of your routines, your relationships, your work, your sense of purpose. And for a while, it fits. Then something shifts. A move, a new baby, a loss, the end of something you thought was permanent. The old version of you doesn’t quite fit the new context anymore.

This isn’t the same as losing yourself. The old version was real. It served you well. But it was also built for a specific set of circumstances, and when those circumstances change, the self that was shaped around them tends to get unsteady.

Victor Turner, a British anthropologist whose 1969 work on rituals and change became foundational in the social sciences, described people in the middle of a transition as “neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.” He was studying cultural rites of passage. But the description fits every kind of major life shift. The person you were has stepped aside. The person you’re becoming hasn’t fully arrived. You’re standing in the gap between them, wondering what is going on.

That gap has a name. Anthropologists call it liminality, a threshold state. And the key thing about it is that it’s supposed to feel strange.

Why we call it “being lost” when it might be something else

Most of us don’t have much vocabulary for being in-between. We have words for arriving somewhere new, and we have words for falling apart. The middle space, the one that doesn’t look like either progress or collapse, tends to get labeled as a problem to fix.

When I didn’t recognize myself after becoming a mother, my first instinct was to diagnose it. Was I experiencing postpartum depression? Was I burned out? Was I somehow failing at the thing I had wanted most? Reproductive psychiatrist Alexandra Sacks gives this particular transition its own word: matrescence. She notes that “it’s no coincidence that matrescence sounds like adolescence. Both are times when body morphing and hormone shifting lead to an upheaval in how a person feels emotionally, and how they fit into the world.” Adolescence gets cultural permission to be messy. Matrescence mostly doesn’t.

And this isn’t only about becoming a mother. The same disorientation shows up across all kinds of transitions: a career change that was clearly right but still leaves you feeling groundless, a move to a new country where you have to rebuild your sense of belonging from scratch, a relationship ending that wasn’t a tragedy but still requires you to figure out who you are without it. The feeling is the same. The identity you knew how to inhabit is no longer available, and the one you’re building isn’t ready yet.

When there’s no name for what you’re going through, you reach for the closest available explanation. And the closest one is usually “something is wrong with me.”

What the in-between is actually doing

I’m not a psychologist, just someone who has been through a few of these gaps. But here’s what I have come to believe: the in-between is not empty time. It is active time. It’s where you quietly stop carrying things that don’t belong to the next version of your life.

When Emilia was born, I had to let go of the woman who was 100% ambition, because that version of me could not also be the mother I wanted to be. I grieved her a little. She had been good at her work and I had spent years building her carefully. But bringing a child into the world is also a choice to reorganize your priorities, and for me that meant my husband took the career lead for a season while I found a new shape for my own work within the time I actually had. That reorganization felt like loss for a while. Then, slowly, it started to feel more like clarity. I hadn’t lost my drive. I had just found a more accurate home for it.

Change management consultant William Bridges spent decades studying how people move through major shifts and found that the difficult middle phase, what he called the neutral zone, is not a problem to escape but a necessary reset. It’s the time when the old is gone and the new hasn’t taken shape. Most people rush through it because standing in uncertainty is uncomfortable. But rushing tends to mean carrying too much of the old version of yourself into the next chapter, which makes that chapter harder than it needs to be.

The person you’re becoming is being built right now, in the disorientation, in the quiet moments where you can’t quite answer simple questions about who you are. That’s not failure. That’s construction.

A few questions worth sitting with if you’re in one of these gaps: What parts of the old version of yourself are you actually mourning? What parts were you holding onto more out of habit than genuine need? And what do you want the next version to include that the old one didn’t have room for? You don’t have to answer any of them today. The in-between is allowed to take time.

One more thing: if the disorientation you’re feeling goes beyond a regular transition and starts to affect your daily functioning or your sense of wellbeing, that is worth talking to a professional about. A therapist who works with identity and life transitions can offer far more than any article. If things feel heavy right now, reaching out is always a good idea.