I bought a $70 ceramic train-shaped cookie jar out of guilt this weekend.
It was 1000% my fault. I was shopping for teacher appreciation presents, and I’d expected to run all over town to find what I needed to compile Les Gifts. On a whim I ducked into a local tea shop, with the hare-brained logic of “you can’t spell ‘teacher’ without ‘tea’” (??????????? huh? ok girl.) And to my absolute DELIGHT they had more than tea — they had bubble bath! Artisanal lip balm! Hand lotion from Copenhagen! A legion of tchotchkes! Total goldmine.
“Whoever does this sourcing here is doing an amazing job,” I said to the woman at the till as I dumped my finds on the counter. “Oh, it’s me! Thanks for saying that — sometimes I feel like I’m amazing at it, and sometimes I feel like I have no idea what people like or want to buy and I feel like I should just shut the entire store down.”
This fantastically talented and creative entrepreneur went on to tell me about how she’s currently in an era that I know all too well — the interstitial void space that hovers between the Old Version of You and the New Version Of You. She’d been crushing it with mobile tea shop and wholesale orders for a few years, decided to get a storefront. Fast-forward to a year and some huge life changes later (marriage, baby, etc.) and things felt different.
It’s that feeling when you know you’ve changed. You’ve outgrown your old life. But you’re kind of in the liquid goo phase between caterpillar and butterfly; a part of you has evolved into the next version of you, but another part of you hasn’t quite caught up to the growth spurt (yet).
*Cue Semisonic.* You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here…
An hour later, I walked out into the sunshine with my 1980s cookie jar in one hand and the weight of my memories of all the times I’d felt exactly like my new cookie jar slinging friend. Running through old game tape in my head, I tried to piece together the similarities of those moments. What did they have in common, other than making me feel like poop from a butt?
The thing I have learned, after enough rounds of this, is that the goo phase is significantly less goo-ey when you can name what’s happening. Not fix it, just clock it. As I delicately secured my cookie jar under the passenger seat belt, I started making a list:
Your winningest strategies — the ones that always used to work for you — have just… stopped working. The tactic you used to make friends in a new city flops. The method that got you clients on autopilot for years has led to radio silence. Your ol’ reliable joke for breaking the ice, exercise for calming yourself down, activity to shake off a funky mood — the tried and true, the 100% success rate stuff — has gone quiet. This is the most underrated diagnostic on this entire list! When a strategy stops working, a variable shifted. And ninety percent of the time, the variable is y-o-u. The technique that worked when you were 27? It worked because you were 27. You aren’t anymore. The technique cannot save you from the developmental fact that the person executing it has changed.
You cannot remember the last time you had an opinion about something you used to have many opinions about. The thing you used to evangelize-and-or-rage about you now describe with the energy of someone reading a particularly dull Google AI summary. It’s like the helium got sucked out of your enthusiasm balloon.
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You feel a restlessness that is not quite the same as burnout. Someone experiencing burnout is a dopamine-seeking missile — they’re energetically fried and looking for a hit wherever they can get one. The outgrowing-your-life kind of restlessness is weirder. It’s less I cannot focus, let me toggle between 17 apps on my phone for the next three hours and more I cannot find the room I’m supposed to be in, because every room I step into feels fine but not right.
The scripts you used to know are POOF gone. You walk into the meeting, the family dinner, the friend’s birthday party, the client call — situations you’ve performed in at least a thousand times — and find that the part of you that used to know exactly what to say, when to laugh, when to leave, seems to have made an Irish exit. Sometimes you walk out of a casj lunch with coworkers and worry that maybe you were acting super weird and they were just being nice to you because they feel bad? Or you leave a friend’s house worried that you said something that offended them, even though the tactical part of your brain knows your homie would call you out if you had. You’re just standing in a room without a script, watching everyone else perform theirs, realizing you have no idea what you are supposed to be in here anymore. The old role doesn’t fit. The new one doesn’t exist yet. So you wing it (perhaps badly), and go home wondering what just happened.
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You’re spending a lot of time shopping or buying things, then feeling horrible about it. Something about the material objects and identity-possessions you used to reach for to feel like yourself are no longer doing the job. So you keep trying. New exorbitantly expensive candle, new hand-knit Norweigan sweater, new ceramic train-shaped cookie jar. You are not a person with a shopping problem. You are a person whose old identity props have stopped propping, and your nervous system is trying to brute-force its way back into the costume.
Your timing is slightly off. You keep missing things. The email. The job opportunity. The window. The birthday. The exit. Your internal clock is still calibrated to a life you are no longer fully living, and it shows up first as small, embarrassing temporal misses you can’t quite explain to yourself.
You never quite land when you’re with your friend group. The dinners happen. The texts get answered. The laughter and the love is real. But part of you is hovering the whole time — you’re present in the room, but something about you never quite touches down and settles. It’s not because the relationship is bad. It might be fantastic, actually. But the person these people know how to receive is a slightly earlier draft of you. And maybe the version of you that’s emerging hasn’t quite figured how to be met yet. DO NOT MISUNDERSTAND ME: “I’ve outgrown them” can be a story we tell ourselves to avoid a harder repair conversation. Not saying you’ve outgrown your friends, or your family, or your partner, and tbh I think unceremoniously ghosting people because you believe you’ve “outgrown” them is weirdly transactional, borderline psychopathic behavior.
It feels like the benevolent force that used to be on your side has gone MIA. Call it what you want — Universe, god, source, Sky Diva, spirit, ancestors, Future Self, the Force. You know the one. The unnamed, unprovable, slightly embarrassing-to-talk-about sense that something was pulling for you — opening doors, bending odds, putting the right person in the right elevator at the right time, making your wishes feel like they were being met halfway. Feels like it’s abandoned you… or at least, like it forgot to text you back. The good news? It hasn’t! The bad news? It has simply stopped being able to help you as effectively, because you are pointed at a door it cannot open. The force works with you best when you’re in alignment — and if you’re desperately gripping to an old way of being when all signs point to the fact that you’ve changed, it’s going to have a harder time helping you out. When you’re in denial, it’s hard to notice miracles abound.
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You can no longer tolerate the kind of content you used to consume by the gallon. The podcast is annoying. The newsletter is tedious. The genre of book you used to inhale now feels like a person at a dinner party who keeps saying the same thing in a slightly different voice. It’s all blah, which makes you sad, so you read/listen/engage out of duty instead of delight.
Compliments and invitations land in a slightly off way. Or you stop getting the compliments you used to receive. Listen, it’s not because all of the sudden you’re a jester flop in the clown square. Just face it — that old praise is for a person you no longer fully are. The invitation is for a room you do not want to be in. You smile and accept and feel like you are wearing a costume of your former self.
You pick fights you do not actually want to win. Some part of us, when we will not consciously change our lives, will arrange for our lives to become uninhabitable on our behalf. So you pick a fight over unloading the dishwasher. Or you cause drama with your favorite freelance contractor. Or you get in a social media feud that lands you on the Discover page.
You keep trying to adjust the thing instead of letting it go. You’re not going to quit the job — you’re just going to ask for a different team. You’re not going to end the membership — you’re just going to go once a month instead of every week. You’re not going to close the business — you’re just going to rebrand it, restructure the offer, hire a VA, take a sabbatical, niche down, niche up, change the colors, fix the font, smoke cleanse the website. You have been “tweaking” for somewhere between eight months and four years. Some part of you knows it needs to be put down, and the rest of you is negotiating with that part by offering it increasingly elaborate compromises. None of them will work. They are not supposed to. They are the resistance wearing a productivity costume.
If you recognized yourself in even a third of these, you’re negotiating with a version of your life that has already tried to evict you, and your refusal to read the eviction notice is the entire reason this feels so hard.
The whisper did not work. The nudge did not work. The Sunday dread did not work. The recurring sinus infection did not work. The envy did not work. The grief did not work. So now we’re at the part of the movie where the friend grabs you by the shoulders and says SNAP OUT OF IT. (The friend is the Universe)
You don’t have to know what the New Life is yet. You really, really don’t. But the old life is over, and it has been for a while. The only thing you’re doing by refusing to admit it is making the transition harder, longer, and significantly more humiliating than it needs to be.
For a little while, you’re going to feel like a hermit crab that’s outgrown its old shell and is now skittering around the tide pools looking for a new home. So naked and afraid of you. But it’s time to put the old life down. The thing you are clinging to is not yours anymore. It hasn’t been for a while. And the version of you that comes next has been waiting, very patiently, for you to notice.
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