In spring of 2022 I moved out of London. A big transition. I wanted to live nearer my ageing parents and see what life outside the metropolis would be like. It turned out that I liked the fresh air and the birds singing in the high trees and the lack of traffic, just as I’d expected. What I wasn’t prepared for was the sense of loss. For the contradictory feelings going on inside, even while external life settled into its new patterns.
I’d forgotten how the inner self takes time to assimilate changes – or may never do so. I’d forgotten that a sense can arise of not quite being here where you are today, nor living there, where you used to be. The old life not giving way to the new. Of a space between the two which is not one thing nor the other.
And this can go on for years. Outwardly, the change may be long over, but the inner adaptation to the transition may be much more complicated. Feelings arise which don’t go away just because you want them to. They arise when you are least expecting them – when you are waiting for your train to work, or when you wake in the middle of the night.
Not does this only happen with moving home. It can happen with all transitions. They can all be complicated. Yes, moving house is a big one, and so is moving from one line of work to another, from one job to another, from one age to another. Starting a relationship, having a child. Death, sickness, a marriage unravelling. Chronic illness, or your body gradually changing. A parent aging. The many losses of life.
Sometimes changes may appear to be purely positive. This happens particularly when we’ve chosen the change. We may think that we should feel good about it, all the time. A marriage, for example, one of love on both sides, surely that’s a change that can only produce good feelings? Yet even this involves an ending, the death of an old way of being.
As Jeanette Winterson writes in her Substack, ‘We’re all attracted to the idea of a new beginning. Of starting over. Of living our best life. We are less interested in what it will cost…Remaking your life starts with unmaking what is there. It’s a loss. A death.’
William Bridges who wrote several pivotal works on transitions, notes three phases to every transition. The first is an ending. What follows the ending is a neutral (or liminal) time between how things were and how they will become. Only later is there true acceptance and the new beginning.
But even that can be too simplistic, too much of a recipe of steps. Sometimes old changes and endings don’t ever leave us completely. Winterson left her home when she was still very young and never went back. Though she says it was the right thing to do (and she’d be a completely different person if she hadn’t – and we wouldn’t have those magnificent books) yet the cost of leaving still haunts her. ‘I have a wonderful home, welcoming and all mine. There’s always the best food and enough to share. The garden is beautiful. And yet, every time I go away on a trip, which for work is often, I have to leave it pristine and perfect, will be doing the ironing at midnight, fixing a dinner for the house sitter, and it’s partly because I prefer order to chaos, but it is also because some part of me believes that I won’t return.’
When we end one phase, something inside us remembers other endings. For Winterson these remembered feelings all relate to leaving home. But the feelings may not be so obviously linked. Moving house may bring feelings of grief similar to those you had when your grandmother died. Changing jobs may bring the pain that occurred ten years ago when a relationship ended. As Bridges says, the feelings may seem to have little to do with what is happening now, but ‘are the product, instead, of the resonance set up between situations in your present and those in your past.’
So how can you help yourself through a transition?
Be realistic about it. Remember that it will take time to assimilate the changes. It’ll also take time to let go of the past.
Friends or a support group or even journalling can all be helpful, to help you work out the complexity of how you feel and express it.
Remember that we’re all different and that there is no one way to deal with a change. There isn’t a ‘right’ way to deal with it, nor a way that you ‘should’ be feeling.
Go walking in nature. Meditate regularly, if that’s something you’re into.
Or talk to someone like me, a therapist, particularly if the feelings that are arising are complicated or unnerving or overwhelming.
