There’s a stretch of time I don’t talk about much. I was twenty-seven, maybe twenty-eight. I’d left the warehouse job in Melbourne, started my Graduate Diploma of Psychological Studies at Deakin, and on paper everything looked like progress. But inside, I felt like I’d been unplugged from something and hadn’t been reconnected to anything else yet. I’d wake up and not know who the day belonged to. The old version of me, the bloke who ate lunch on TV boxes and kept his head down, was gone. The new version hadn’t shown up. I was just floating in the gap between the two, and it felt like something was deeply, fundamentally wrong with me.
I remember calling my brother Justin one evening. He asked how I was going. I said, “Yeah, good, mate.” And then I sat on the floor of my apartment for twenty minutes afterward, trying to figure out whether that was true.
It wasn’t a crisis. I know that now. But it felt like one at the time, because no one had ever told me what it actually was.
The space between who you were and who you’re becoming
Major life transitions, whether they’re chosen or forced upon you, share a common feature that rarely gets discussed honestly: the person who enters the transition is not the same person who emerges from it. And the middle part, the disorientation, the fog, the strange sense of not recognizing your own preferences or knowing what you want, that middle part is where most people panic.
They think they’re falling apart. They search for the old version of themselves like someone patting their pockets for lost keys. They try to rebuild what was, because the uncertainty of what’s coming feels unbearable.
But there’s a reason that uncertainty feels so destabilizing. It’s because identity itself is being reorganized.
Research published in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology has explored what happens when people go through significant life transitions, including job loss, divorce, relocation, and retirement. The findings consistently point to a phenomenon that psychologists sometimes call a “fertile void”: a period of meaning dissolution that precedes meaning reconstruction. The old frameworks for understanding yourself, your roles, your habits, your identity markers, they collapse. And for a while, nothing replaces them.
That void feels terrible. It also appears to be necessary.
Why the brain resists the in-between
One of the things I learned during my psychology studies, and then experienced firsthand in therapy, is that the brain treats identity disruption as a threat. Your sense of self is, neurologically speaking, a prediction system. It tells you who you are so you can navigate the world efficiently. When that system gets scrambled by a major change, your brain doesn’t calmly wait for updates. It sounds alarms.
This is partly why transitions so often come with anxiety, insomnia, irritability, and that strange flat feeling where nothing seems to matter and everything feels slightly unreal. I know that flat feeling well. I lived inside it for months during my late twenties, and I built my entire identity around not needing help, so I white-knuckled through it alone.
A framework developed by researchers at the University of Waterloo describes the self as a constantly updated narrative. When major disruptions occur, that narrative becomes incoherent. The brain’s response is to try to force coherence, to jam the old story back together. But if the old story was incomplete (and it usually was), forcing it back together means shrinking yourself to fit a container you’ve already outgrown.
What I didn’t understand, sitting on my apartment floor at twenty-seven, was that the disorientation wasn’t evidence of breakdown. It was the sensation of an outdated self-concept losing its grip.
The anthropologist’s word for it
Long before psychologists studied this, anthropologists named it. Victor Turner, studying rites of passage across cultures, identified a phase he called liminality: the threshold state between an old identity and a new one. In traditional cultures, this phase was expected. It was built into the structure of life. You weren’t supposed to know who you were during the crossing. That was the whole point. The not-knowing was the transformation.
Turner observed that people in the liminal phase often describe the same things: a sense of being invisible, of social roles falling away, of feeling simultaneously empty and strangely open. The ancient traditions understood that this emptiness was sacred ground, the place where something more honest could take root precisely because the performed version had been stripped away.
Modern Western culture has no equivalent framework. We have productivity apps and five-year plans and a cultural allergy to ambiguity. So when someone enters a liminal phase after a divorce, a career change, a death, a move, they look around for instructions and find none. The absence of a roadmap gets interpreted as personal failure.
What actually happens when you stop forcing coherence
In therapy, my psychologist said something I’ve carried with me for years. She said: “You’re not confused about who you are. You’re just meeting parts of yourself that the old structure didn’t have room for.”
That landed somewhere deep. Because the truth was, the version of me that worked the warehouse, that checked his bank balance four times a day, that kept his jaw clenched so tight the physiotherapist called the knot between his shoulder blades “concrete”, that version was real. But he was also a survival construction. A survival pattern where love felt conditional on being low-maintenance. A carefully assembled performance of steadiness that left no room for the parts of me that needed something different.
The transition didn’t destroy that version. It just revealed that he was a draft, not a final copy.
Research on post-traumatic growth by Tedeschi and Calhoun has found that people who undergo significant life disruptions often report, after the disorientation passes, a deeper sense of personal authenticity, richer relationships, and a reordered set of priorities that align more closely with their actual values rather than inherited ones. The key word there is “after.” The growth doesn’t happen instead of the suffering. It happens through it.
You may have noticed something about the people in your life who’ve come through a genuinely difficult transition. Not the ones who “bounced back” immediately (that’s often just a faster reassembly of the old mask). The ones who went quiet for a while. Who seemed uncertain. Who maybe seemed to be recalibrating which parts of their life actually belonged to them. When they came back, they were different. Clearer. Less interested in performing and more settled in something quieter and harder to name.
That settling is what’s on the other side of the disorientation. It doesn’t arrive with fanfare. It arrives with a slow, private recognition: Oh. This is closer to who I actually am.
The cost of rushing through
Here’s what I wish someone had told me when I was twenty-seven and floating. The temptation during a transition is to grab the first new identity that presents itself. New job, new relationship, new city, new philosophy. Anything to end the discomfort of not knowing.
And sometimes those things are genuinely right. But often, the rush to resolve the ambiguity means you build the next version of yourself on the same foundations as the last one. You swap the content but keep the architecture. Different job, same compulsive self-reliance. Different relationship, same inability to ask for what you need. Different city, same knot between the shoulder blades.
The disorientation is asking you to stay with it long enough to examine the foundations themselves. To ask, before you rebuild, whether the blueprints you’ve been using were ever actually yours.
I spent my twenties hiding my sensitivity behind competence, my anxiety behind discipline, my loneliness behind self-sufficiency. The transition that brought me to my knees wasn’t a single event. It was the accumulated weight of a self-concept that couldn’t hold all of me. And the months of feeling lost, truly, genuinely lost, were the months when the parts I’d exiled started quietly returning.
What the fog is actually protecting
There’s a reading of this that sounds like spiritual bypassing, like I’m telling you the pain is a gift, so just be grateful. I’m not saying that. The fog is genuinely awful. The loss of identity that accompanies a major transition can look, from the inside, indistinguishable from depression. Sometimes it is depression, and it needs clinical support. I’m not romanticizing suffering.
What I am saying is that the disorientation itself contains information. It’s telling you that the person you were organized around being can no longer contain the person you’re becoming. And that gap, that breathless, groundless middle space, is where the most honest version of you has room to arrive.
The people who change most profoundly after painful experiences tend to be the ones who stopped insisting they were fine long enough to find out what was actually true.
I think about that night on the apartment floor sometimes. Twenty-seven years old, no idea who I was becoming, terrified that the answer might be “no one.” What I couldn’t see then, and what I can see now with the clarity of a decade’s distance, is that the emptiness wasn’t a void. It was a clearing. The old performance had finally exhausted itself, and for the first time in my adult life, there was space for something I hadn’t rehearsed.
If you’re in that space right now, the fog, the not-knowing, the quiet terror of having lost the plot, I won’t tell you it gets better. I’ll tell you something more useful: the disorientation is accurate. You have lost the plot. The old one, anyway. And the next one, the one that’s forming slowly beneath the surface, in ways you can’t yet see or name, that one has a better chance of being yours.
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