Passage 7: The Rhythm of Transition — Oscillation, Not Closure
Perimenopause is the clearest proof I have that transition isn’t linear—and that change often includes grief.
You can wake up and feel like yourself—clear, capable, even a little brave—and by evening feel like your body has changed the rules again. Heat rises. Sleep splinters. Focus slips. Even your own scent can feel unfamiliar. You cancel plans for the weekend because you can’t predict which version of you will show up. And the disorienting part isn’t only the symptoms. It’s the way the symptoms land inside a story—about aging, about femininity, about the relevance of the reproductive years. About what a body is allowed to do, and what it isn’t.
Light
Dark
““The bereaved person… [moves] back and forth between dealing with the loss and addressing the demands of everyday life.””
Temperature, rest, and metabolism may oscillate throughout this phase—but patience and tolerance do, too. Your sense of competence. Your trust in your body. Sometimes, even your role in the room—at home, at work, in your own life.
Am I broken? Why can’t I stabilize? Shouldn’t I be past this by now? What will make me feel like myself again?
Most of us don’t ask these questions out loud. We’re trained to think fluctuation is a misstep and control is proof we’re doing it right. So, we reach for solutions. When the body feels unpredictable, the mind looks for something to hold—an answer, a protocol, a patch, a stack, a rule.
Yet often, perimenopause is less a breakdown than a renegotiation. As estrogen and progesterone signaling becomes more erratic, the downstream systems—sleep regulation, thermoregulation, glucose tolerance, and stress response—lose some of their previous predictability. That’s why the same day can swing: steady at noon, frayed by night (or vice versa). The nervous system is working harder to maintain equilibrium with shifting inputs. The sway isn’t a mistake. It’s allostasis in motion: the body searching for new steadiness.
And still—beneath the physiology—there’s often something else moving.
Grief.
Sometimes the most disorienting layer is emotional, not medical: grief for predictability. Grief for the familiar body, the routine cycle, the reliable return to baseline. Grief for the version of you who could assume tomorrow would feel roughly like today. Even without a specific date on the calendar, the rules have changed. And the psyche registers that change as an ending.
The loudest message we’re served right now is that menopause should be managed, fixed, and tidied—as if the only goal is to return to an earlier version of you. And, once again, I’m not here to argue against symptom relief—relief matters. A lot! But when the only acceptable outcome is getting back to a perceived portrayal of “normal,” any natural fluctuation starts to feel like a failure.
But what if the back-and-forth isn’t a flaw, but part of your body’s intelligence at work, learning the shape of your adaptation?
The fluctuation is your system surveying in real time—testing, adjusting, learning, leveling.
What’s on the other side isn’t stability the way you used to define it—but a new steadiness you will learn to trust, shaped for who you are becoming.
In this way, perimenopause is a great example of the tempo of transition: a repeated oscillation between disruption and repair, contact and recovery—an ongoing swing among:
symptoms that rise and fall
grief for what’s ending
and the life that still needs to be lived
(Few of us get medical leave for menopausal transition—which means the world keeps asking for output while your nervous system is busy trying to find a new baseline.)
In the last Passage, we mapped direction. Now we’re naming rhythm, which helps us recognise that transition—menopausal or otherwise—doesn’t ask us to just move past what we’re mourning. It asks us to develop the capacity to move between loss and restoration—between facing the ending, then facing the day—again and again, in tolerable doses.
If you’ve lived through a transition that rearranged you, you already know this cadence.
““Grief comes in waves… sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees.””
You can be functional at 10 a.m.—answering messages, making decisions, sounding like yourself—and undone at 10 p.m. by a memory, a thought, a familiar smell, the sudden realization that you can’t go back. Nothing about that means you’re inconsistent. It means you’re a human in contact with an ending. It’s your nervous system finding a way to hold the ending without being swallowed by it.
The truth is, you don’t have to pick one version of yourself and call the other one a setback. This is what change feels like when it’s real: the day still asks you to function, and the night still tells the truth. Grief—and transition—often move like this: back and forth, in waves.
There’s a model that helps us hold this without shame. It’s called the Dual Process Model (DPM) and it recognizes oscillation between loss-oriented coping and restoration-oriented coping.
Two orientations = one movement
Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut are grief researchers who noticed a mismatch: what people actually do in the hours after loss, and how grief processes are scripted in Western culture—through self-help narratives, workplace expectations, and even the way “stage” models get simplified in popular conversation. At the time of their inquiries, many influential models were interpreted as a clean trajectory—do your “grief work,” move through the stages, and arrive at acceptance. But when Stroebe and Schut listened closely to bereaved people, the lived pattern was messier, more intuitive, and more survivable than those tidy arcs suggested.
““Unlike stage models… [the DPM] does not prescribe a fixed sequence… [it] allows for individual variability.””
People don’t grieve in a straight line. They move back and forth.
One moment, they’re right up against what ended—feeling it, remembering it, bargaining with it, collapsing under it. And the next moment, they’re doing the life that still has to be lived—feeding the dog, paying a bill, getting a child to school, making a decision they never wanted to make alone.
In 1999, they named that movement the Dual Process Model, which acknowledges that coping oscillates between loss-oriented attention (turning toward what hurts and what it means) and restoration-oriented attention (returning to what’s required now, and what must be rebuilt).
One quick note: “restoration” can be a misleading word. It can sound like back to normal—or like stepping back to take care of yourself. That’s not quite what Stroebe and Schut meant. In their model, restoration-oriented coping is less about recovery and more about re-engaging life: returning to the tasks of living, taking on new roles, and building new routines in a world that has changed.
The point wasn’t to “move on.” It was regulation: letting yourself touch the loss, then returning to the life that still needs you. If you force restoration too early, you don’t eliminate grief—you drive it underground.
And that’s why this model belongs in a series about transition: bereavement is an intense form of reorganisation, but the rhythm applies far beyond death. What Stroebe and Schut mapped in grief is something we see in any true passage. The back and forth isn’t failure. It’s a nervous system finding a way to hold change without being swallowed by it.
Most of us do this without realising it’s a skill—until someone names it. You may recognise it as crying in the shower and then packing lunch, or sitting numb through a Zoom meeting, only to be undone by a song in the grocery aisle later that afternoon.
““Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.””
For years after Isamu died, I carried an internal calendar no one else could see. His birthday. The day he died. Our wedding anniversary. Diagnosis day. Surgery one. Surgery two. The day of the grand mal seizure. Dates that lived in my body like weather fronts—approaching long before they arrived.
At a certain point a friend asked me, gently: How many days do you need?
And something in me flinched—then softened. Not because I was “over it,” but because I understood what he was really asking: How many days will you give entirely to the land of the lost? How many will you sequester—yourself included—inside what can’t be changed?
That was the beginning of a shift I didn’t yet have language for: letting some of those days hold new experiences too. And while it may have felt like it for a second or two, it wasn’t a betrayal. It was a way of staying alive.
Loss-oriented: facing what ended
Loss-oriented coping is the part that turns toward the ending.
It’s the wave that hits when you see a photo, hear a song, walk into a room, wake up at 3 am and realise it wasn’t just a dream. It’s those days marked on the calendar, etched into your memory.
It’s grief, yes—but it’s also meaning. Memory. Longing. Anger. Sometimes even conflicted relief.
It’s that sentence so many of us carry: “This isn’t how it was supposed to be.”
We’re taught to reserve the word grief for the big and “official” endings. But grief has a wider jurisdiction than our social expectations allow. It can be triggered by anything that severs meaning within us—anything that requires us to confront an ending we didn’t consent to, or a byproduct we can’t control.
When what helped also hurts
I think about how often the oscillation between loss and restoration gets triggered not only by what we lose, but by what we trusted (or trusted in).
There’s a particular sting when the story you were living inside was I’m helping—and then it breaks open to reveal: this also harmed. The loss isn’t just what happened. It’s the certainty you built your goodness on. It’s the innocence of thinking intention would be enough. It’s the ground you trusted—suddenly gone thin.
History is full of stories that mirror this internal conflict—inventions that carried a promise and then revealed a dark shadow. Dynamite was engineered to make mining more controllable—and then it was absorbed into warfare, progress, and destruction sharing a name. And chlorofluorocarbons—Freon—were adopted as a “safer” refrigerant compared with toxic or flammable alternatives, only to be recognized later as a driver of ozone depletion: safer in the home, harmful in the sky. Even the story of prescription opioids carries this double exposure: pain relief and public-health devastation braided together through incentives, marketing, and scale.
“There’s a particular sting when the story you were living inside was I’m helping—and then it breaks open to reveal: this also harmed. ”
The pharmaceutical drug Thalidomide is another clear example. It entered the world as a helpful relief for nausea, including morning sickness. But it became a global emblem of unthinkable damage when its adverse effects came to light. When taken in early pregnancy, it caused catastrophic fetal harm, most notably severe limb-reduction defects along with other organ malformations and fetal loss.
That is grief with teeth. Not only the loss of what happened, but the loss of what you believed you were participating in. It burns because it doesn’t stop at the facts. It goes after your sense of yourself—your virtue, your judgment, your belonging in the story you thought you were authoring out of love and devotion. If you’ve ever lived inside that kind of crack, you know it isn’t only intellectual. It’s moral. It’s the moment your nervous system realizes: I was acting in good faith—and good faith didn’t protect anyone from consequence. And that’s exactly the kind of moment the Dual Process Model can hold: the body registering rupture, the mind trying to revise reality, the psyche swinging between telling the new truth and doing the laundry.
Lineage without its maker
Loss isn’t only about what disappears. Sometimes it’s what returns—changed, stripped of substance, unrecognizable. Frankensteined.
I think about the food writer and cookbook author Adam Erace, who recently found out that an AI-generated knockoff book was circulating—one that lifted from his real work, including his cookbook Dinner at the Club, coauthored with chef Joey Baldino.
What made Erace’s and Baldino’s discovery so gutting wasn’t only that their work was copied. Copying, at its best, can be a form of admiration. Most creators want their work to travel—adapted, riffed on, made new in someone else’s hands. It’s that it was mutated without the care that had made it meaningful. The counterfeit book had chaotic, nonsensical recipes, contradictions, missing steps. It represented “confidence” without competence. Erace tested some of the recipes in the imitation and watched them fail in real time... a ricotta cheesecake recipe missing basic instructions, stuffed peppers that couldn’t possibly cook in the time the instructions recommended.
“Loss isn’t only about what disappears. Sometimes it’s what returns—changed, stripped of substance, unrecognizable. ”
The AI could generate methods that sounded right, but it couldn’t hold the reality that makes a recipe true: what happens when a human actually tries to follow it.
What the chefs experienced is a particular kind of loss. Their work dished up to them in public… but hollowed out. Their voices without their hard-earned discernment. Their craft without their standards. Their lineage without their names. And the body knows it instantly: a sickening drop, a flare of anger, a tight jaw, a throat that wants to swallow the whole thing down. It leaves behind that sentence grief always brings: this isn’t how it was supposed to be.
That’s a part people don’t always recognise as grief—when the loss isn’t only the ending. It’s what comes next—when the world keeps moving, and something in you can’t accept the new reality fast enough to live inside it.
People think grief is only missing what’s gone.
But sometimes grief is watching something keep going—just without you included.
After a death, it can feel like this: the room is still here, the routines are still here, the calendar keeps turning… but the one person who made a particular reality real is not. You’re standing at the edge of life, stunned by the ongoingness.
After a divorce or breakup, you can feel it in the strangest places. You realise your life has split into parallel timelines—yours, and theirs—and theirs keeps unfolding without your participation. Not just ended. Continued.
Empty nesting can hold this, too. The house is the same, but the point of balance has moved. The role that organised your days isn’t gone because you did something wrong—it’s gone because life changes. And still, the body can register it as a rupture: this isn’t how it was supposed to be… at least not this fast, not this quiet, not like this. Because now your child’s life is happening off-site. You used to pack their lunches, but now you don’t know what they ate (or if they did). You used to be the one to wake them up in the morning and now you don’t know if they slept well or not. You don’t get the casual hallway updates—the tiny complaints, the half-stories, the “can you look at this?” that used to stitch your days together.
Being let go from a job can have the same effect. The organisation carries on. Your work is redistributed. Your name disappears from the thread. The story continues, but you’re no longer inside it.
That’s why the challenge isn’t only “This ended.” Loss is also, “This continues… but without its lineage, without its watcher, without its home, without this human being.”
And that—so often—is loss-oriented coping: turning toward the ending, and telling the truth about what it meant. Sometimes the afterlife is social. Sometimes it’s internal. Sometimes it’s the future—quietly disappearing in real time. And sometimes it’s all of those things at once.
The vanishing future
There’s another layer to loss-oriented coping that doesn’t get named enough. Loss is not just past-facing; it’s also grief for the future you were already living.
It’s the plan your nervous system had already rehearsed. The next chapter you’d already inhabited in your mind. The version of life that felt inevitable—because you’d been building it, tending it, counting on it. So when the ending comes, what breaks isn’t only what was. It’s what was supposed to happen next.
That’s why the sentence isn’t only “I miss them” or “I miss that.”
It’s “This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.”
A protest, pointed forward.
That kind of grief doesn’t always look like sobbing. Sometimes it seems like a low-grade unreality.
People recognise this in so many passages, even if they’ve never used the word grief.
When you’re let go from a job, it’s not only the missing paycheck, it’s the future you thought you were walking toward—the identity, the belonging, the story of yourself as someone needed.
When the house empties, it’s not only the quiet, it’s the end of a role that organizes your days and your sense of purpose. You don’t just miss your kids, you miss the version of you that was required.
When you retire, it’s not only work that ends. It’s the structure, the usefulness, the social fabric. Even if you chose it, there can be a strange grief: Who am I when I’m not the one who…?
When a relationship ends—breakup, divorce, even the slow fade of a friendship—you’re not only grieving the person. You’re grieving the shared future: the holidays you assumed, the jokes that would keep accruing, the shoulder you thought would be there when things got hard.
“Grief forces oscillation in real time: one hour you’re functioning... and the next, you’re flattened.”
And then there’s a grief that makes the world feel less verifiable. It happens when you lose the only person who held a particular reality with you. The only one who could say, “Remember when…?” The only other one who knew the origin story from the inside.
I think about this often with my brother-in-law, my late husband Isamu’s brother.
We don’t always have a cultural script for sibling loss—especially in adulthood—so it can become a kind of disenfranchised grief: real, life-altering, and somehow still treated as secondary. But losing a sibling isn’t only losing a person you love. It can be losing the co-author of your origin story—the keeper of a world only the two of you could fully verify. The one person who could look at you and confirm, without explanation: Yes. That happened. Yes. That was real. It’s the disappearance of the witness who held the details with you—the context, the shorthand, the shared memory that made the past feel sturdy.
That’s the aftermath of grief, and it’s also the vanishing future. Siblings don’t just share a past—they share a throughline. The children you were together. The adults you were becoming side by side. The possibility of the children you might raise, who would know each other because you did. The long arc of caring for aging parents—being the two who could trade shifts, translate history, remember what mattered, and carry what nobody else can see.
This is loss-oriented territory. Not problem-solving and not rebuilding yet, just turning toward the truth of what ended—and what was erased along with it. And if we’re honest, grief forces oscillation in real time: one hour you’re functioning—texting family, handling logistics, being “the grown-up”—and the next hour you’re flattened by a memory.
Restoration-oriented: building what’s next
Restoration-oriented coping is the part that turns toward the day-to-day.
It’s the moment after the wave—when life still needs a shape, and you ask, “Okay. What’s required of me now?” That morning after Isamu died, when I resumed the morning routine, and cooked the quinoa and sprinkled in the berries so my toddler could eat breakfast. Collecting the glass bottles and dragging them out to the curb for recycling pick-up. Dialing the dentist’s office to schedule your biannual teeth cleaning.
Restoration-oriented coping isn’t “moving on.”
It’s responding in a way that recognises: life is asking something of me.
It’s learning new routines (or old routines in a new way). Taking on new roles. Building new supports. It’s figuring out what you need now that you didn’t need before—practically, relationally, physiologically, spiritually.
It’s competence. Structure. The scaffolding of a new normal.
It’s that sentence we don’t always say out loud, but we start living into: “I can’t do it the old way anymore. I need a new way.”
When I was still inside my role at the company I founded, mornings looked like discipline. I woke up by 5 a.m. to afford myself a small pocket of steadiness—meditation, movement, mindset—before the day could start demanding things from me (as it often would the moment I opened Slack or my inbox.)
When the transition at the end of that role reached its peak, that morning structure was disrupted. Sleep wouldn’t hold until five. My nervous system was primed for alarm, and some mornings the internal siren went off at 3:30 or 4:00 am—no external clock required.
Now I’m in a different phase. I’m practising restoration (in both the Dual Process Method and recovery sense.) I’m trying to “sleep in.” I’m testing what happens when there’s no external alarm on my phone, and when the internal alarm doesn’t have to run the show either. Truth is, sometimes the fight-or-flight switch is still there, but it is, slowly, learning a new rhythm.
And yet I still want the benefits of my morning routine. I’m not abandoning what helped me stay grounded, even when the conditions for grounding are different. But I can feel that what my system needs now is recalibration—and that includes deep recovery as I find my new normal—so I can move forward with the integrity that matters most to me.
The future you have to author
Restoration-oriented coping isn’t just problem-solving or productivity. It’s the slow work of authoring a new future after the old one no longer exists.
It’s choosing a new timeline when you don’t yet trust time. It’s making commitments without the old certainty. It’s becoming your own witness—learning to say, this matters now, even when the world isn’t reflecting it to you yet.
If I’m honest, I’ve been practicing this alongside you as I write these Passages. My default language is productivity—create, clarify, make meaning, make something useful, be in a collective dialogue. But right now, before any clean “next,” I’ve needed to let myself oscillate between grief and creativity. It’s a form of regulation, a way of allowing the ending to be real without letting it swallow the whole day.
Restoration-oriented coping is that strange work of holding two truths at once: the ache of what won’t be, and the small, steady decisions that make something else possible. You can be grieving the old timeline even as you begin to sketch a new one. You can be missing the certainty you used to live inside, as you practice the unfamiliar courage of making plans without guarantees.
In that sense, restoration isn’t the opposite of loss. It’s what we do while loss is still present. It’s authoring the next chapter with a hand that sometimes shakes—because the ending and the living are both happening in the same body.
Sometimes restoration is as simple—and as radical—as letting yourself recover long enough to know what you actually want next.
Many people do restoration as effort: fixing, organising, optimising. But an overlooked form is receiving:
rest without justification
help without repayment
ease without guilt
support without being the strong one
Oscillation: the movement between loss and restoration
Here’s the key to this model that I most appreciate and want to be sure to share with you: healthy coping isn’t choosing one side and staying there. Healthy coping is oscillation—moving between the two.
Stroebe and Schut didn’t identify oscillation to make grief more complicated. They named it because unbroken contact with loss can overwhelm a person, while stringent focus on “getting on with life” can numb them. The movement between the two orientations is how humans find balance: we touch what hurts, then we reach for what restores; we make meaning, then we handle logistics; we feel, then we function. Oscillation is how stress through transition becomes survivable.
And it’s important to remember that the back-and-forth isn’t instability or a detour. It’s dosage. It’s the nervous system doing what it always does with intensity: exposure, then recovery. Like breadth. Like intervals. Like muscle recovery. Contact, then respite—so the system can slowly integrate what happened.
And it’s worth naming what happens when oscillation gets disrupted. Stroebe and Schut later described overload—the moment grief is no longer just grief, because the loss has also created too many secondary stressors to carry at once. When there’s no room for respite, the system starts to pay: sleep frays, pressure rises, the heart runs hotter, mood narrows, immunity and resilience take hits. And overload is often more about “too little margin” as opposed to “too much feeling.” Those secondary stressors are piling on, further impacting the body’s burden and recovery.
A body can’t stay in “contact” forever without cost.
There’s also the cultural layer I referred to earlier in this Passage. While grief is complicated, many of us were trained to adopt a single “correct” grief style: either be strong and productive or emotional and expressive. The Dual Process Model rejects that binary as much as it challenges the storyline that grief should move in a straight line, step by step toward “closure.” Research has revealed patterned tendencies—men, on average, may lean more toward restoration; women, on average, may lean more toward loss—but those leanings are shaped by entrenched social roles, permissions, determinants, and expectations as much as by temperament or gender assumptions.
The point isn’t who does it right. The point is flexibility—the capacity to move against your default when life requires it.
So, if some hours you’re right up against what ended, and other hours you’re building what helps—that’s your system titrating reality—letting in what’s true in doses you can metabolize, then returning to what keeps you oriented to life. And over time, oscillation becomes a skill: a widening capacity to feel without flooding, to function without numbing, to stay in contact without getting swallowed.
Tip: If you want to stay in the personal thread, skip this section and go to “The reflex that disrupts the rhythm.”
A note on cultural static
Oscillation is part of your biological intelligence, helping you avoid overload. And yet the pressures to “move on” are many. Three particular factors that distort the rhythm and make it feel like failure may sound familiar: time, performance, and medicalization.
Time
Modern life runs on linear time—calendars, deadlines, response windows, productivity cycles.
Transition does not.
Grief has timestamps that don’t care about your schedule. Perimenopause makes this especially clear—the calendar no longer offers explanation. It can look like inconsistency. It can feel like you’re “backsliding.”
But that’s the mismatch: the clock demands continuity. The nervous system runs on capacity—what it can metabolize now, and what it can’t.
Oscillation is the body’s way of staying inside that capacity: contact, then respite; meaning, then management.
Performance & “wellness”
We’ve inherited a cultural expectation that healing should be visible.
You should look better.
Sound better.
Be more “regulated.”
Have a clean takeaway.
Move toward an inspiring ending.
Even when we don’t engage with social platforming, that expectation still lives in the air. We start performing recovery for other people—and then, quietly, for ourselves.
That’s where oscillation gets distorted, because oscillation is not the makeover story, it’s the weather we live in when we’re navigating transition. Some days, the most honest thing is tears. Some days it’s laughter. Some days it’s numbness. Some days, it’s just about getting through the hour. All of that can be part of adaptation.
But performance culture makes one side of the swing look like a problem. Loss-oriented moments might be labelled “too much,” “messy,” “dramatic,” or “stuck.” Restoration-oriented moments might be labelled “cold,” “avoidant,” “in denial.”
Real restoration increases capacity; performative restoration increases pressure.
The wellness marketplace tends to treat restoration like a product and a personality: buy the right thing, follow the proper routine, become the “after.” But restoration in transition isn’t a brand story. It’s a function. It’s what a system does when it’s allowed to repair.
So we often start policing ourselves: Which version of me is acceptable?
The cost is that oscillation can become shameful when it’s actually the mechanism that keeps you intact.
Medicalization
Medicalization isn’t malicious. At its best, it’s lifesaving, but it’s also a reprieve. And yet it has a shadow side worth illuminating: it can turn a passage into a problem to solve.
When a culture treats every fluctuation as a symptom, we lose the ability to read fluctuation as information. We start treating the body like a broken machine instead of a communicating system—so the question narrows to, “How do I shut this down?” instead of “What is this trying to tell me?” We stop noticing how the system is adapting—testing, recalibrating, learning—and start searching for a single lever that will force steadiness.
“Fluctuation isn’t always malfunction. Often, it’s information.”
Yes, symptoms deserve support. Yes, relief matters. But sometimes, the medicalisation of every symptom, or the way we’ve come to know it, can flatten physiological complexity into a single goal: stabilize.
So if your week has both a good day and a hard day, you may not think, This is a swing my system is navigating. You may instead think: The treatment isn’t working. I’m failing. I’m back at the beginning.
That’s the distortion.
Oscillation isn’t proof you’re broken. It’s often validation that your system is trying to survive change without going into overload. When overload shows up, everything feels urgent; nothing feels doable.
Time demands consistency. Performance demands a tidy story. Medicalization demands a fix.
But transition asks for something else: rhythm—contact and respite, meaning and logistics, feeling and functioning.
The reflex that disrupts the rhythm
There’s one very human reflex that disrupts oscillation and is worth mentioning: grasping. That quiet clench. The insistence that what changed shouldn’t have changed. The bargaining with reality: If I find the right way, maybe I can keep the old version of this intact.
Sometimes we grasp at what was because we can’t yet metabolize the truth we’ve learned—because the story we lived inside has fractured. Because what we trusted—what we thought was steady, safe, or true—has crumbled, and the mind keeps reaching for the earlier script.
Grasping may look like control, but it’s often fear—an attempt to keep the ending from becoming undeniable. And the cost is steep: when we cling to what was, we can’t fully enter what’s required now. We don’t get relief; we get bracing. We don’t get stability; we get strain.
Grasping is not loss, and it’s not restoration. It’s a postponement of both.
I can name grasping more clearly now because I’m not inside it the way I was. There was a recent stretch when I kept reaching for the old structure—the familiar pace, the familiar scope, the familiar visibility—the old rhythm of knowing where to put my energy and how it would land. I was acting as if I could just hold on tight enough, I could preserve the version of the work that had shaped my days, steadied my identity, and fulfilled my mission for a very long time.
It wasn’t only strategy. It was attachment. It was my nervous system trying to keep what had been coherent from becoming unrecognizable. I bargained in the margins of reality: Maybe if I fix this one piece. Maybe if I phrase it just right. Maybe if I keep pushing, the old form will hold.
Loss-oriented hours carried the ache of that. Not only grief for what had ended, but grief for the structure that used to organize my body: the feeling of being in the flow of it—connected, effective, in motion. And, underneath that, the quieter loss of a future I assumed I was still walking toward from inside that familiar frame.
What shifted wasn’t that I stopped caring. It was that I stopped trying to make the old form behave like it still belonged to me. My grasp loosened, and is still loosening—not all at once, but in small releases I can feel in my chest and jaw: the moment I realized I couldn’t rebuild my own stability—or even the coherence of what I believe in most—by (or through) bracing.
Now the loss is simpler, and also more honest: I don’t have the same structure, or the same body of a day, or the same platform, or the same reach. That’s real.
And restoration has begun to look like what I can actually do from here. Writing. Envisioning. Creating. Sleeping again! Being in dialogue with colleagues and friends—in the field and out. Letting stories find me and letting them change me. Listening for the thread beneath the noise. Making meaning that doesn’t require the old scaffolding to be my only proof of legitimacy.
In other words, I loosened my grip, stopped trying to preserve the previous version of my work, and started imagining a new way to carry what matters most. Not instead of grief. But alongside it. That’s the oscillation I trust now: touch what ended, then return to what restores—until the system can live inside the new reality without going into overload.
I oscillate between those two worlds sometimes within the same hour. A wave of grief for what was and what will no longer be, then a practical decision. A surge of anger, then a quiet moment of competence. A longing to rewind, then an unexpected exhale—because the tightening in my chest loosens for a moment and I realize: this is what letting go feels like from the inside. Not a single release. A series of small unclenchings.
“Here’s the oscillation I trust now: touch what ended, then return to what restores—until my system can live inside the new reality without going into overload.”
And when I can stay honest, I see what grasping had been trying to do: it had been trying to protect the meaning, not the manifestation. It had been trying to keep what mattered from being erased. But protection isn’t the same as holding. Sometimes protection is mourning what was—and then choosing to carry the truth forward in a new form.
That’s the rhythm I’m practicing now. It’s not always soothing, sometimes it’s simply presence: the email, the meal, the trash, the bill, the gym, the one small decision that keeps a day from collapsing—before the grief feels oppressive again. Not because I’m “over it,” but because I’m still in it. Because life is still asking something of me. And because the only way through a real passage is to keep moving between what hurts and what helps, until the movement itself becomes its own kind of flow.
A rhythm not a recipe
I can’t give you a map—not the kind we like, with steps and timing and proof you’re doing it right. The body doesn’t work that way in transition.
Grief has its own clock.
What I can offer is permission: to touch what’s ending, and then return to what’s here. Again and again. Not as a performance of healing, but as a way to stay in your life while something in you is still changing.
““Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.””
A final note
Oscillation is human. It’s how stress becomes survivable: touch the stressor, then return to what restores—before the system tips into overload.
You’re not trying to “be done” with the ending.
You’re learning how to live with it—without letting it consume you.
I’m right there with you—swinging, swaying, oscillating—sometimes steady, sometimes not. And I’m grateful we can call it what it is: human.
References:
Stroebe, M., & Schut, H. (1999). The dual process model of coping with bereavement: Rationale and description. Death Studies, 23(3), 197–224. https://doi.org/10.1080/074811899201046
Stroebe, M., & Schut, H. (2010). The dual process model of coping with bereavement: A decade on. OMEGA—Journal of Death and Dying, 61(4), 273–289. https://doi.org/10.2190/OM.61.4.B
Stroebe, M., & Schut, H. (2016). Overload: A missing link in the dual process model? OMEGA—Journal of Death and Dying. https://doi.org/10.1037/pag0000116
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Kelly, C. (2025, April 29). RecipeTin Eats founder accuses Brooki Bakehouse of plagiarising recipes in popular cookbook. The Guardian.
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