Passage 8: Provisional States — The craft of becoming
Portland looked like summer. Café doors open, sunlight pooling on the sidewalk, people moving as if the day had neither weight nor consequence. But for me, it wasn’t just a summer afternoon. It was split-screen.
I walked among them like I belonged—like my life could be explained by errands. But a few blocks away, my husband, Isamu, was in the hospital after a July 4th grand-mal seizure, more than two years after his brain tumor diagnosis. The choices weren’t small or medium, hot or iced. They were intervention or cessation. Decisions so big that language felt thin.
When a family member was with Isamu in the hospital room, and someone else was with our toddler, Gilbert, at home or at the park, I would sometimes drift through the fancy urban neighborhood surrounding the hospital just to catch my breath. As if I could toggle realities—borrowing a distant version of myself who belonged to tasks and easy summer days, not hospital hallways. Warm, still air. Shop windows. A world that wasn’t fractured.
Light
Dark
These breaks felt surreal. I’d blink, and the street would reappear—bright and ordinary—like nothing unbearable was happening elsewhere. I felt like a time traveler, dropped into an alternate reality. Trying to act natural. Acutely aware that I did not belong. A bell would ring when I opened a shop door. Cool air. Racks arranged by style. A clerk asking, casually, “Can I help you with something?”
On those streets, and inside those stores, no one knew what I was carrying. Strangers could make up whatever story they wanted about a thirty-something woman shopping on a weekday afternoon—dazed, distracted, maybe just indecisive. And while it was hard not to blurt my truth out loud, I also knew it wouldn’t land. Blue or green did. Small or medium did. Those choices were legible. They didn’t require a witness to the unbearable.
““Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.””
That was over twenty years ago—and I can feel its familiarity now as I move through a significantly different passageway of transition: not at the beginning, not at any end, but in that peculiar middle where something has already changed, and nothing has fully settled. I’m on the edge of an ending, not quite anchored on any “other side.”
I can see now that I wasn’t just shopping in those days before Isamu’s death. I was building a temporary structure—something small enough to hold when the real choices were far too large.
That’s what a provisional state is: not denial, not indecision, but intelligent adaptation. When the unbounded is too much, we reach for the bounded—small choices that keep us livable while the larger outcome remains unknown.
Whereas the last Passage named the rhythm that keeps us intact—contact, then respite—this one explores what happens in those hours when we return to the everyday. Because coming up for air isn’t the same as being “over it.” Sometimes restoration is simply what lets you make dinner, answer the email, choose the shirt, show up for the appointment—not as proof that you’re “fine,” but as a way to stay with what hasn’t resolved.
This Passage is about that middle texture—restoration without resolution. In truth, you can come up for air and still feel unmoored—less flooded, maybe, but still unsure who you are in the life that’s changing.
It might look like the mundane act of trying on a pair of shoes, then another, just to learn what fits.
And maybe that’s the first clue: when life becomes too big to metabolize, we reach for what’s small enough to hold. The nervous system chooses what’s manageable when the unbounded is too much. That’s an intelligent move. Smaller choices lower cognitive load and soften threat detection. They don’t solve the larger unknown—but they keep you steady enough to stay in it.
Acclimatization
The body doesn’t acclimatize to a new altitude all at once. It learns the new air in increments.
My boyfriend, Dave, is an avid hiker—and in his earlier years, a mountain climber. If he could, he’d probably have completed the Seven Summits by now—the highest peak on each continent. He’s the only person I know who can look at a photo of a mountain and tell you not just which one it is, but also which face you’re looking at—as if peaks have fingerprints. He recognizes mountains the way other people identify plants. It’s a kind of fluency. A way of seeing I’ve never known possible.
Because of Dave, I’ve watched more Everest movies, documentaries, and YouTube adventurers than I can count. People traversing the route from Lukla, a small gateway town where many treks into the Everest region begin, to Base Camp, and, if conditions allow—both the mountain’s and the person’s—to the summit. I started watching because it delighted Dave, reluctantly agreeing when I would’ve chosen something else. Then I realized I was equally captivated. Not by the mountain, exactly, but by the human pattern beneath it: each story a study in adaptation, in learning how to live inside a reality that can’t be controlled.
Everest doesn’t reward your wishes. It rewards physiology—and luck.
““We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.””
The mountain doesn’t care how strong you were at sea level, how clean your plan is, or how many years you spent training or saving for this grand opportunity. Up there, the body has rules. There’s less oxygen. Sleep gets strange. Appetite can disappear, and digestion becomes temperamental. Judgment narrows. Vigilance rises. Your world shrinks down to what’s immediately manageable: layers, water, steps. Breath.
And it isn’t just the body that needs surveillance. The mountain has terms, too—weather that changes without warning, wind that can erase a plan in an hour, snowpack that decides whether a slope holds or slides. You can’t bargain with any of it.
You don’t conquer that kind of reality. You learn how to move inside it.
And then the lungs keep changing the plot. As they travel higher, many climbers develop the dry, hacking “Khumbu cough”—driven by cold air, low humidity, and relentless breathing at altitude. But even without illness, the body finds ways to protest. And in nearly every account, the decisions that matter aren’t heroic. They’re granular.
“This is how we survive the unlivable: not with bravery, but with calibration.”
Drink now or later. Rest day or push. One more slow lap up and back—climb high, sleep low—just to teach the body what it needs to know.
The climbers who make it farthest aren’t the ones who force it. They’re the ones who titrate their exposure to the new conditions—building capacity incrementally, letting the body catch up to the altitude as much as it’s able, and listening to the people who’ve been here before—guides who know the difference between courage and insistence—moving only when the mountain opens a window.
I never knew it before meeting Dave, but even reaching Base Camp is a feat. That trek alone takes days, with acclimatization rests built in—because speed is not your friend at high elevations. And Base Camp itself isn’t the end or beginning of anything. It’s a prolonged middle—now an overcrowded one. A temporary tent city built on ice.
Base Camp is a threshold where you live alongside the mountain long enough to find out whether the body can learn: this is the air now. The work is mostly rest, recalibration, and the next small, smart decision.
Incremental exposure
Climbers have names for the acclimatization that happens at each base camp—climb high, sleep low; rest days; turnaround times. Your body doesn’t care what you call it. It cares that you’re not demanding more than it can tolerate.
In my clinical world, this principle has a familiar phrase too: start low, go slow. It’s titration—physiological acclimatization in miniature. Whether someone is trialing a new supplement, adjusting a medication, or introducing hormone therapy, we begin with the smallest meaningful change and give the body time to respond. Partly, it’s practical: fewer moving pieces means cleaner data. But it’s also biological: sensitive systems often do better when the “exposure” is sized—small enough to integrate, small enough to recover from, small enough to learn from.
Sometimes the smallest dose is plenty—relief you can absorb, without paying for it later.
In transition, we reach for small choices for two reasons. First: agency. When the big decisions are unholdable, the nervous system looks for something more concrete—hot or iced, one small errand, one simple yes or no—because the low-stakes are survivable.
Second: titration. We stabilize in increments. Water now. A ten-minute walk. Sleep with no alarm clock. Not as self-improvement, but as physiologic support beams while the larger outcome remains undecided.
Either way, the point is the same: you’re not trying to summit or “arrive.” You’re trying to stay steady in a storm.
A model for the middle
Once you start noticing acclimatization—how the body adjusts in phases—you see it everywhere. Not just on mountains. But underwater. In hospitals. In waiting rooms. In the months after a diagnosis. In the strange stretch after a resignation, retirement, a move, a loss—when life looks familiar at the grocery check-out, but nothing feels routine on the inside. The mind wants a conclusion. The body wants titration.
There’s a woman who studied this kind of change—not the medical kind, not the mountaineering kind, but the identity kind. Her name is Herminia Ibarra, and what she really mapped was the middle.
She’s best known as a career thinker because she studied professional reinvention—nonlinear paths, identity shifts, and change that doesn’t unfold neatly. But her real contribution is naming what happens when clarity isn’t available yet. You don’t think your way into a new self. You try your way into one—through small, livable experiments that let you acclimatize to a new reality. Start low, go slow—except here the “dose” isn’t a supplement. It’s a new way of being.
““Trying on different styles, like different clothes, almost.””
I like this model because it reaches far beyond job change. It describes any passageway where the old self no longer fits, and the new self isn’t ready to claim you yet—after divorce, after diagnosis, during caregiving, after migration, through menopause, in grief. Anywhere you’re living in overlapping realities, trying to stay livable in your own skin while the ground is shifting. I recognize this terrain intimately—as a person living it, and as a clinician who’s watched the nervous system try to make a home in uncertainty.
Career transition is simply a place where identity change is easy to see.
A few definitions, so we’re speaking the same language
Ibarra’s model is simple in shape, even if living it isn’t. When we’re in transition, we tend to reach for clarity the way we’ve been trained: analyze, decide, commit. But Ibarra noticed something else: for most people, the order is reversed. Movement comes first; meaning comes later.
Clarity is often the result of contact. You learn what fits by living in small drafts long enough to gather real data.
That process has a name: provisional selves—the enacted drafts. They are not imaginary futures, but real-life versions of you, things you can test without making a final claim.
And the method has a name too: test-and-learn. Small action first, certainty later. You run modest experiments—safe enough to survive, real enough to teach you something—because identity is often too complex to solve in your head.
Three capacities for the middle
What comes next in Ibarra’s model is tangible, but it takes practice—and permission: three capacities for living inside the in-between. Think of them as scaffolding—temporary, adjustable, strong enough to hold you while something new is being built.
This is where her work stops feeling like career theory to me and starts feeling like transition training. When certainty isn’t available, we still have ways forward: we try small, survivable experiments; we widen the room with new reflections; we tell a story that’s true enough for now—without forcing it to be final.
And I’ll name my bias up front: I’m a test-it-in-the-body person. I trust what settles my system after a small shift, what I can repeat without collapse, what holds up on an ordinary Tuesday. So these capacities aren’t about “figuring yourself out.” They’re about gathering experience-sized evidence—one draft at a time—until the next version of you has something more substantial to stand on.
Capacity 1: try small
There’s a particular pressure that shows up in the middle: the pressure to declare. To name what you are now or next. To explain what happened. To make it sound coherent—to yourself, to other people, to a culture that treats certainty like good character.
But the middle rarely gives you the conditions for a clean declaration. So instead of announcing a new identity, you practice one—quietly, incrementally, in rough sketches.
““By rehearsing these clumsy, often ineffective, sometimes inauthentic selves, they learned more about the limitations and potential of their repertoires and thus began to make decisions about what elements to keep, refine, reject, or continue to search for.””
For Ibarra, the capacity to “try small” is exactly what it sounds like: one tiny, survivable step toward what you think you might be growing into. Not to lock anything in—just to learn what holds.
These are our provisional selves. They are enacted drafts, not reinvention theater. Just honest experiments, small enough to survive, real enough to teach you something.
And this is where my see-it-to-believe-it way of moving through the world shows up. I’m not great at believing in a shift just because I proclaim it. I believe what becomes true in practice—what the body can tolerate, what holds up in real life, what provides a clean signal as you go.
My former team and I used to call this tendency of mine “rolling the snowball.” You can’t make a snowman by starting with the snowman. You start with a small mound in your palms—pack it, see if it holds, roll it, pack it again—until there’s a base sturdy enough to carry what comes next.
That’s what “try small” is: building the base before you ask it to hold a new identity.
A lived example
Here’s what “try small” often looks like in my current transition: it’s not a big announcement. It may just be a sentence.
I’ll rewrite my LinkedIn bio—just a few lines, not a manifesto—and feel my body react before my mind can justify it. A tightening at one phrase. A strange relief at another. (The truth is that despite a “job” change, I am still me. I still own my lived experience and expertise. They cannot be taken from me.)
I’ll try a title that used to fit, and it lands like an outgrown coat. I’ll try a different one, and it feels almost true—still awkward, but breathable. Sometimes I’ll say the sentences out loud, alone, the way you try on jeans in a dressing room mirror, turning this way and that. It’s not about deciding my whole future. It’s just to notice: does this feel inhabitable?
That’s a provisional self: not an identity you’ve “become,” but an identity you can test without betraying yourself. And, truth be told, I’ve lived this particular example almost weekly over the past several months.
What “try small” actually does
Trying small isn’t about being tentative forever. It’s about titration—manageable exposure, followed by enough space to register what happened.
When the experiment is too big, your system floods, and you can’t tell what’s true. When it’s too small, you don’t get enough of a feedback loop or signal to learn. The art is sizing it: real enough to matter, contained enough to recover from.
In Ibarra’s career research, that might look like not quitting and “becoming” something new overnight, but taking on a low-stakes project in an adjacent domain. Advising a friend’s startup for six weeks. Volunteering for a cross-functional assignment. Accepting a temporary role—not because it’s the final answer, but because it’s a real-world room where your emerging identity can be tested. Maybe it's taking interviews to explore new possibilities.
The same principle applies far beyond work.
After a diagnosis—or during a long stretch of not-knowing—“try small” might look like one experiment in self-advocacy. A small, meaningful shift in how you talk to your doctor, like:
“Can you walk me through how you’re thinking about this?”
In caregiving, it might be one boundary practiced for three weeks:
“I can come Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.”
It’s not a final stance on love or duty—just a provisional structure that tells the body: we are allowed to be finite. And while we’re living inside something unfinishably large, we can still choose smaller decisions that have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Physiologically, small experiments lower the cost of uncertainty. They reduce cognitive load. They give the nervous system something bound to work with, while the unbound remains unanswerable.
Socially, provisional living may look like procrastination in a culture that wants assuredness on demand. But when you try small, you’re not avoiding becoming—you’re refusing to perform a finished identity while you’re still in the craft of it.
Capacity 2: meet new mirrors
There’s another kind of pressure that shows up in the middle, and it’s more subtle than the pressure to declare. It’s the pressure to stay inside the mirrors you already have—the people who love you, the people who have history with you, the people who can tell your story in shorthand.
By “mirrors,” I mean the people whose gaze helps you remember yourself. Over time, you start seeing yourself through their eyes, too. And in seasons of stability, this is a gift: you feel known, seen, held in belonging.
But in transition, that same gift may come with a sneaky downside. The mirrors that know you best often reflect you as who you were—simply because their love is full of evidence. They’ve watched you in your old roles. They carry years of experiencing you in their bones. Even when they’re trying to support you, they may default to the version of you they recognize most easily.
Meeting new mirrors isn’t about abandoning your people. It’s about widening the room—adding mirrors, not replacing them. (That said, if a mirror proves unsafe—insisting you stay small, stay silent, stay the same—distance isn’t drama. It’s self-respect.)
The goal in meeting new mirrors is simply to stop asking the same mirrors to do every kind of reflecting.
Strong ties—family, close colleagues, longtime friends—can keep you tethered when you’d otherwise float away. They can also keep you pinned to the past when you’re trying to move forward. Both can be true.
Ibarra noticed this in career change, but it’s evident far beyond work: identity doesn’t just change through insight or willpower. It changes in relationship. We need new contexts—new rooms, new conversations, new witnesses—so the emerging self can be met without being corrected back into the old one.
This is where her concept of “weak ties” matters. Not for networking, but for oxygen. Weak ties widen bandwidth. They give the nervous system a little more room to try on the new draft. Since weak ties don’t carry as much prior evidence, they can take you at your word.
“Strong ties know you as who you’ve been. Weak ties can meet you as who you’re becoming.”
And this is where my see-it-to-believe-it way of moving through the world shows up again. As a creator, I can’t just think my way into believing a new identity. I have to hear it out loud. Feel what my chest does. Notice whether my system contracts or softens. And I pay attention to what happens when a new mirror reflects it back—whether it lands as permission, pressure, or a kind of truth I can finally breathe life into.
A lived example
Sometimes a new mirror arrives through one question—asked by someone who doesn’t need you to stay consistent with any previous version of you. It may be a person you don’t know well who says something simple, almost casual, and it changes your internal weather.
And sometimes you become the new mirror for yourself as well.
When I’m in the middle, I’ll ask myself a question that’s small enough to answer honestly—something that doesn’t require certainty, only connection. It may be something like:
What am I being asked to live inside right now?
What feels truest right now—even if it’s unfinished?
What am I not willing to carry forward?
The question doesn’t fix anything. But it loosens the grip. It gives the nervous system permission to consider a reality your old mirrors can’t yet imagine—not because they’re wrong, but because they’re full of you-as-you-were.
And there can be a reprieve in that: not having to defend your draft. Letting your own attention meet you without the reflex of, “But you’re the one who always…” Sometimes the most restorative room is the one where you aren’t required to be the person you’ve already been.
What new mirrors make possible
New mirrors give your provisional self somewhere to land—a relational space where you can be unfinished without being rushed, corrected, or collapsed into a final ruling. Sometimes that’s one weak tie—someone who knows you lightly enough to meet you freshly. A friend’s neighbor you connected with at a dinner party. The person you stand next to in strength training week after week. Sometimes it’s a room organized around a shared practice—a class, a volunteer initiative, a walking group—where you can show up without having to narrate your whole backstory. Sometimes it’s a time-limited container with edges—a writing workshop, a culinary course, a yoga retreat, a shared project—where you can bring a draft and let it stay draft-sized.
“New mirrors don’t tell you who you are. They make room for who you’re becoming.”
In Ibarra’s language, new mirrors can include weak ties, guiding figures, and communities—people who widen what feels possible simply by reflecting you back without demanding you be consistent with who you used to be.
And its important to name that access matters here. Not everyone has equal space for “new rooms.” Caregiving load, disability, finances, race, class, geography—these shape who can show up where, and who gets to be uncertain without penalty. So this capacity isn’t about hustle. It’s about finding whatever form of relational oxygen is available—one person, one conversation, one identity-permissive space—and letting it count.
Capacity 3: tell the newer story
Transitions are partly about becoming—moving from an old self into a new one. Even when you don’t yet know who you’re becoming, language still matters, because you have to live among other people while your life is rearranging.
People ask questions. They want an update. They try to place you.
And in the middle, the words you choose can either compress you—or give you somewhere to stand.
First comes the pressure to declare—so we practice trying small. Then the pressure to stay inside the mirrors we already have—so we meet new ones. And now, the third pressure: the pressure to make it sound coherent before it actually is—so you can stop feeling exposed.
This is where so many of us reach for a storyline without realizing it. We start shaping a redemption arc because it’s the narrative culture recognizes: breakdown, breakthrough, better version of me. It’s legible. It’s familiar. And in the middle, it’s often premature.
Ibarra offers a more realistic frame. She calls this sense-making: the ongoing work of interpreting what’s happening, integrating what you’re learning, and revising the narrative as you go—in conversation, in real time, in the rooms where you still have to answer to your life. Identity doesn’t only change through action. It also consolidates through language—through the stories we tell that make the emerging self internally believable and socially legible.
I’ll name my own bias here: I don’t trust stories that only sound good. I trust stories that feel inhabitable. The ones you can say out loud without your throat tightening. The ones that reduce friction in the body. The ones that don’t require you to override your own nervous system just to appear coherent.
What this looks like in real life
Remember: this isn’t “your life story.” It’s what you say when someone asks:
“So what’s going on with you?”
“What do you do now?”
“How are things?”
“What’s next?”
In the middle, we may swing between two unhelpful modes of response.
One is over-polish: you give the version that makes other people comfortable. You sound composed. You sound certain. It moves the conversation along.
And then your body tells on you. Your throat tightens. Your energy drops afterward, as if you performed instead of connected.
The other is overexposure: you tell it too raw, too soon, before the story has any scaffolding. You say the truest thing you can say, and it lands too heavy for the room. The listener flinches, offers a platitude, tries to fix you, or changes the subject. You walk away feeling more alone than before you spoke.
Both teach you something. Both are part of learning what your story can hold right now.
What helps in the middle is a draft—true enough to live inside, flexible enough to revise.
A draft story has three jobs
A workable “newer story” is simple. It:
tells the truth without demanding closure
protects your nervous system from overexplaining
leaves room for revision
Here are a few draft versions (choose what sounds like you or use these for inspiration):
“I’m in a transition season. I’m learning what fits.”
“I’m mid-shift. I’m trying a few things and letting the next step reveal itself.”
“Some things have ended; some things are emerging. I’m not rushing the narrative.”
“I’m acclimatizing. That's the most honest truth.”
If the context is professional, you can add a clean edge:
“I’m running a few small experiments over the next couple of months.”
“I’m reshaping how I work. I’ll have more clarity after I’ve tested a few things.”
If the context is personal, you can protect your bandwidth:
“It’s tender right now. I can give you the short version.”
“I’m still inside it. I’ll say more when I have more room.”
That last line matters. Sometimes the “newer story” is also a boundary.
Why this matters in the body
Honest language reduces internal contradiction. It lowers the effort of holding two realities at once: what’s happening, and what you’re pretending is happening. When your words match your state, your system can stop bracing quite so hard. It doesn’t solve the transition. But it does make it more livable.
Culturally, we’re rewarded for sounding finished. The middle rarely gets that kind of respect. Still, you’re allowed to speak from inside it. You’re allowed to live in a draft. You’re allowed to revise.
The point isn’t to have the perfect story. To be the hero (or have completed her journey.) Or to have gratitude for what still hurts.
The point is to have an honest story—true enough to keep you moving for your own benefit, not to accommodate others.
Some lived examples
There are moments when you can feel, in real time, that your story has gotten too constricted. The caption version. The one that suggests: I’ve integrated this. I’ve learned the lesson. I’m good now.
Someone asks, “How are you feeling?” and you offer the clean answer: “Better. I’m figuring it out.” You leave out the unpredictability—the days you wake up agitated, the way symptoms still flare when the stress of the unknown hits, the vigilance that has become automatic. “Better” is the socially acceptable word. It reassures them. For a split second, it reassures you, too. Yet your body stays tight anyway, like it knows you edited the truth.
Or you’re at dinner, or on a call, and someone asks, “So what are you doing now?” And you hear yourself say: “I’m really excited—this transition has been so clarifying. I’m building what’s next, and it feels aligned.” It’s not untrue. It’s incomplete. It skips the sleepless 3 a.m. spirals, the grief of what you’re leaving behind, the uncertainty, the days you still can’t quite name yourself. You say it to keep the conversation moving. To avoid follow-up questions. To not look messy. Later—alone—you feel the cost of how much of your reality you trimmed away for others' comfort.
And there are other moments when you tell the story too soon, too raw—before it has any support structure. You offer the truest sentence you have, and it doesn’t land. Or it lands with more tenderness than you intended. The listener flinches. The air changes. You walk away feeling exposed and, oddly, responsible for their discomfort.
All of this is data. All of it is part of the craft.
The goal isn’t to find the perfect story. It’s to find a draft you can live inside—one you can revise as your life keeps changing.
And here’s the strange mercy: your system gives feedback.
Your body knows when you’ve over-edited. Your body knows when you’ve over-shared. And the room gives feedback too—through ease, through tension, through what gets met and what gets deflected.
That’s how you recalibrate. Not by getting it “right,” but by noticing what costs you and what steadies you—and shaping the next draft accordingly.
What the newer story actually does
In the middle, sense-making isn’t closure. It’s stabilization. It’s how you bridge the discontinuity between who you were and who you’re becoming without forcing a premature identity claim.
In Ibarra’s research, people don’t just change jobs; they change how they explain themselves. They try out different versions of their story with different audiences—friends, colleagues, weak ties, guiding figures. They notice what feels authentic, what feels inflated, what feels defensive. They revise. They revise again.
That revision isn’t manipulation. It’s integration.
Identity consolidates through action—and it consolidates through language, through stories that make the emerging self internally believable and socially legible.
After diagnosis, one of the hardest parts is that you may not yet have a story that makes sense. You might not have a name for what’s happening. You might not have certainty. But you still have to live in your body and speak about your life. A working story can reduce the strain of explaining—especially while the “facts” are still evolving.
“We’re still figuring out what this is, but I’m taking it seriously and tracking what my body is doing.”
“I don’t have a clean label yet. Right now it’s tests, data, and learning what helps.”
“I can’t explain it neatly, but I can tell you the truth: my capacity is different right now.”
In grief, telling the newer story might mean learning how to speak without collapsing into either silence or overexposure—finding a sentence that tells the truth without asking the listener to carry what they can’t hold.
“I’m not okay, but I’m not in danger—today I just need things to be simple.”
“I don’t need advice right now. I just want a little steadiness.”
“I can talk for five minutes, and then I’ll need to stop. I hope you understand.”
In midlife change, it might mean refusing the dominant narrative of decline without replacing it with the performance of “I’m thriving.” Something honest and still dignified.
“I’m in a recalibration season. Some things are falling away, and I’m letting them.”
“I’m not falling apart—I’m re-sorting what matters, and it’s taking time.”
“I’m learning a new relationship with my body. I’m not narrating it as a crisis or a victory.”
Words can’t fix reality. But honest language reduces the physiological cost of pretending. When your story matches your state, your nervous system stops spending energy scanning for what you left out.
And culturally, we’re swimming in narratives that demand resolution—takeaways, redemption arcs, strength performances.
But the middle deserves a different kind of speech: true enough for now, and humble enough to change.
““Sometimes it takes many rehearsals before it comes out just right. What happens in the retelling is not just a more polished story; we finally settle on a narrative that can inform the next step.””
The stories we’re allowed to tell
We live in a culture that wants the messy middle to be invisible. Handle it privately. Return when you can explain it. Come back with a takeaway. A soundbite of transformation.
By the time we reach for a workable draft, most of us have already absorbed the rules of storytelling without realizing it: make it make sense, make it inspiring, make it useful. In other words, make the hard part end.
But the middle doesn’t cooperate. It doesn’t resolve on schedule. It rarely offers a clean throughline or a satisfying moral—not even to the person living it. And the world doesn’t have much patience for that.
We’re surrounded by narratives that treat certainty as competence, closure as maturity, and ambiguity as a failure of resilience. Grief gets rushed into meaning. Illness gets rushed into lessons. Identity change gets rushed into the rebrand.
““The individual often works on inducing or inhibiting feelings so as to render them ‘appropriate’ to a situation.””
This pressure lands in the body—not as an idea, but as a demand.
When you’re still acclimatizing—still learning the air—you can feel the cost of speaking as if you’re already adapted. You can feel it when you offer the succinct version. The sanitized version. The caption that implies you’ve integrated it, learned the lesson, and are fine now.
Sometimes we do that for privacy, to avoid rubbernecking, or because we can sense that the listener doesn’t want the draft—they want the finished copy.
Whatever the reason, it isn’t neutral. It’s expensive.
When we compress the middle into a tidy ending and a shiny new beginning, we ask the nervous system to do something it can’t do: resolve what hasn’t resolved. We override the signals that say, not yet. We force ourselves into coherence on command. And then we wonder why we feel brittle—why our sleep stays light, why digestion gets reactive, why everything takes more effort than it “should.”
This is part of why Ibarra’s work resonates beyond career change. She doesn’t just offer a framework—she legitimizes something our culture resists: unfinishedness as a real state. A provisional state. A middle that deserves respect. A lived space that deserves time.
It also clarifies the social stakes. We don’t all have equal permission to be provisional. Some people can say, “I’m in transition,” and receive cushion and curiosity. Others receive judgment. Some bodies are granted complexity; others are required to be coherent. Some people can try on new identities and be seen as brave. Others are read as unstable, unreliable, ungrateful, dramatic, difficult, or taking too damn long. Even in the most tender transitions, the culture is still keeping score: who gets to be in the middle, and who gets penalized for it.
Which is why the capacities I’ve shared don’t need to be perceived as self-improvement steps. They’re acclimatization experiments inside a culture that doesn’t naturally support life-in-progress. Trying small isn’t indecision—it’s integrity. Meeting new mirrors isn’t networking—it’s relational oxygen and fresh context. Telling the newer story isn’t rebranding—it’s stabilization.
And if there’s any quiet defiance in this passage, it might be this: you don’t owe the world a tidy ending while your life is still telling the truth. You’re allowed to live in the draft. You’re allowed to revise. You’re allowed to be in a body that is still learning the air—even if it makes people impatient or uncomfortable. Even if your circumstances require that you keep on keeping on.
A personal note from the middle
I’ve spent the last several months writing this series on transition the way some people keep a hand on the wall in a dark hallway—moving forward, yes, but also needing contact. I’ve been reading models, tracing their threads, looking for language sturdy enough to hold what I can feel happening in my own life.
And I’ve been living it, too. Not as a concept, but as real acclimatization. As climbing, one step at a time. As the body learns new air. As the mind keeps asking for a map.
I’ve felt the endings—the ones that arrive with paperwork and announcements, deadlines and dissolutions. And also the ones that arrive more privately, as a loss of appetite for a version of life that once made sense. I’ve felt all the thresholds. I’ve felt that peculiar stage where you can’t go back, and you can’t yet see what’s ahead, and people around you keep living as if the ground isn’t shifting under your feet.
I don’t think I expected to finish this series on some bright, definitive “other side.” If I’m honest, I’m not even sure I believe that place exists in the way we’ve been taught to think it might.
And, if I’m perfectly frank, I’m not done. I’m still oscillating, still titrating—still looking for ways to mark the gateways that continue to emerge.
Big transitions don’t just happen and then stop. They touch you, and they keep touching you. They leave residue. They leave grooves. They leave a new sensitivity in places you didn’t know you could feel so much. They write themselves into your days—your startle response, your tenderness, your attention, your clarity.
And sometimes, later, you can look back and say: it wasn’t all ruin. But even that doesn’t erase what’s true. It left a mark that changed the way you move through the world. Who you trust. What decisions you make, and the way you weigh consequences and downstream impact.
““For in grief nothing ‘stays put.’ One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs.””
I also don’t know what you expected when you started reading or listening to this series. Maybe you thought the final passage would offer resolution. Maybe you’ve been hoping for that, not just for me, but for yourself. We’re so hungry for endings that mean something. We want proof that the pain had a purpose. We want the story to come out clean.
But here’s what has surprised me as I’ve written: I didn’t find myself by explaining my way through this. I found myself by recognizing myself in the models, over and over.
Each passage has held a different reflection. Some were loss mirrors. Some were restoration mirrors. Some were physiology mirrors—showing me, gently, that my nervous system has been doing exactly what a nervous system does when the ground changes. Some were identity mirrors—naming why certain choices have felt impossible, and why smaller ones have felt like mercy, why I felt ready for some action and resistant to others.
And again and again, I found something subtle: these frameworks weren’t telling me what to do. They were acknowledging what I was already doing. Intuitively.
A nod. A little confirmation. Not that I was doing it “right,” but that I wasn’t making it up. That my confusion had shape. That my oscillation wasn’t failure. That my provisional state isn’t avoidance. That my need for bounded choices, for new mirrors, for draft language—isn’t weakness. It’s human adaptation.
I’m further along the path than I was when I wrote about endings in Passage 1. That much is true.
And I’m practicing—this is the most authentic word—letting the acclimatization be okay.
I’m practicing living in the draft without shaming myself for not being final. I’m practicing being a person whose identity is in motion without turning that motion into a performance. I’m practicing allowing the next version of me to arrive the way so many real things arrive: not with a declaration, but with repetition—through what I choose, what I tolerate, what I return to, what I keep learning to set down.
And if you’re here too—if you’ve been reading this series because you’re in your own threshold season—I want to name what I suspect is already true:
You don’t need to be on the other side to be making progress.
You don’t need to know the ending to be faithful to your life.
You don’t need a perfectly coherent story to be human.
Like me, you may simply be testing the air. You may be in a provisional state. You may be building capacity one small choice at a time while the larger outcome remains undecided.
And if that’s where you are, I want you to hear this, clearly:
It counts.
It is not a half-life. It’s a life being lived honestly, in the middle.
What restoration actually asks
Big transitions don’t only change your story. They change your inputs—what you’re exposed to each day—and your tolerance for them.
When life is uncertain, the nervous system behaves exactly as it was designed to: it narrows. It prioritizes immediacy. It keeps you upright. So the basics—sleep, blood sugar stability, digestion, light, movement—stop being “healthy habits” and start being support beams. Not opportunities for optimization, but structural supports.
In the clinic, I see this over and over: when someone is in a prolonged middle—grief, illness, caregiving, divorce, perimenopause, professional upheaval—the body pays for the uncertainty. The ambiguity has a price. It costs blood sugar regulation. It costs sleep depth. It costs digestive motility. It costs patience, memory, and emotional range.
And then something ingenius happens when we rebuild the basics: it becomes easier to tell the truth. Easier to make decisions that match reality. Easier to notice what fits and what doesn’t.
It's not that the transition is over; it’s that the system has more capacity to hold it.
So if you’re in the middle and you want to practice restoration as capacity-building, here’s what I mean in plain language:
Sleep scaffolding: not perfect sleep—just enough rhythm that your brain trusts rest again.
Blood sugar steadiness: fat, fiber, and protein early enough that you aren’t negotiating your life on adrenaline.
Digestion (yes, poop): because it’s hard to adapt while your body is stuck in fight/flight or freeze. (We can let some sh%t go.)
Light and movement: no fitness project, just nervous-system orientation—proof that you are still in a day.
These aren’t “fixes.” They’re the foundation that makes the rest of the work possible.
How we live in the draft
If you’re still in it—still acclimatizing—let’s make this tangible…
When the air is thin, you don’t summit by willpower. You summit—if you do at all—by respecting what your body can integrate. The middle asks for the same kind of respect.
What helps, I’ve noticed—what holds—often comes down to three quiet kinds of work.
First: choose one small, reliable experiment you can survive.
No reinvention. No leap. Just something with edges and a natural endpoint. Two weeks. A month. A single sentence you try on. A boundary you practice. One appointment where you ask a different question. One small change your nervous system can metabolize without flooding.
The body doesn’t learn a new reality through inspiration. It learns through lived data.
Second: widen the room.
There’s no need to replace your people, but expand your mirrors—add one or two places where you can be unfinished without being corrected back into who you were. Sometimes that looks like one conversation a month with someone who doesn’t carry your whole backstory. Sometimes it looks like one community where you’re allowed to be provisional. Sometimes it’s a guiding figure—an elder, a peer, a practitioner—who doesn’t rush you to iron out what isn’t resolved.
We underestimate how much identity change requires relational oxygen.
Third: tell the truest draft you can tell today.
There is no need for a redemption arc. No need to tidy the ending. Just a working version that your body can live inside.
Right now I’m in a transition where…
I’m running a few small experiments around…
What I know is still true about me is…
If you can speak the truth at that level, your nervous system doesn’t have to keep scanning for what you left out. Less internal argument. Less performance. More capacity for the ordinary work of being human—sleep that holds, digestion that moves, steadier blood sugar, clearer decisions.
That’s where my clinical mind returns: these Non-Negotiables aren’t a virtue project in the middle. They’re load-bearing. They’re not because you’re trying to be good—but because you’re trying to be able.
Because the body is the place where the middle happens.
A closing from the middle
I don’t have a clean ending to offer you. Not because I’m withholding one—but because this is the kind of passage that doesn’t always end on cue. Sometimes it doesn’t end so much as it changes shape. Sometimes you look up one day and realize the air feels less urgent. Sometimes you don’t notice until you find yourself choosing a color in a store, and it’s just a color again—not a borrowed reality.
For now, I’m still here—still learning what I can carry, still adjusting to the altitude, still letting the draft be a draft.
And if you are too, I’ll leave you with this:
You don’t have to be certain to be faithful.
You don’t have to be finished to be in motion.
You don’t have to be on the other side to be becoming.
Just keep making the next small choice you can metabolize.
Just keep finding the mirrors that can hold you without hurrying you.
Just keep telling the version of the story that doesn’t make your body flinch.
That’s not a consolation prize.
That’s the anatomy of transition.
References:
Ibarra, H. (1999). Provisional selves: Experimenting with image and identity in professional adaptation. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(4), 764–791. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2667055
Ibarra, H. (2003). Working identity: Unconventional strategies for reinventing your career. Harvard Business School Press.
Ibarra, H. (2015). Act like a leader, think like a leader. Harvard Business Review Press.
Markus, H., & Nurius, P. (1986). Possible selves. American Psychologist, 41(9), 954–969. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.41.9.954
Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380. https://doi.org/10.1086/225469
McEwen, B. S. (1998). Protective and damaging effects of stress mediators. The New England Journal of Medicine, 338(3), 171–179. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJM199801153380307
Hackett, P. H., & Roach, R. C. (2001). High-altitude illness. The New England Journal of Medicine, 345(2), 107–114. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJM200107123450206
