Life Transitions: When A Good Life Starts To Feel Like A Bad Fit

Over the past few months, I’ve had a number of conversations with women who are struggling with fit. Finding your place in a new role, a new phase of life, or a new community can be tough, but that’s not the kind of fit I’ve been thinking about. I've been considering what happens when you no longer fit as comfortably into the life you've created. 

Bottom line:  Whether expected or not, life transitions can be disorienting.

It’s a strange and a bit surreal place to be: living a life you worked for and still wondering, Why doesn’t this feel quite right? Or even, Is this it?

If I drew a composite sketch, she would be someone you might recognize. You might even recognize her within yourself.

The woman who’s handled a lot. Maybe she built a successful career in a complex organization, succeeded in a field where women were still the exception, or created something entirely her own. She may also have raised a child through circumstances no one could have prepared her for, survived serious illness or a difficult marriage, cared for aging parents, weathered losses, or held a family together during a long, hard season. Likely she’s done more than one of these at the same time or at least in rapid succession.

She’s resilient and knows how to deal with life when someone needs to take charge, make decisions, initiate change.

Now, perhaps for the first time in a while, many of the pieces are more or less where she hoped they would be. The crisis has passed. The career is established. The children need her differently. The thing she spent years working toward has happened, or at least enough of it has.

And she is left wondering why something feels off. Why she feels unsettled.

There are all sorts of reasons we might reach for to explain this discord, ranging from Prince’s “Maybe I’m just like my mother, she’s never satisfied” to a nervous system that has spent years carrying too much. Most of the explanations for these feelings lean toward something that needs fixing.

Why can’t I just appreciate what I have? Why am I looking for something else when I worked so hard to get here? Why am I not satisfied? These are some of the quiet questions I hear women ask of themselves.

What If Nothing Needs Fixing?

It made me wonder: How do we approach this inner discord when the life or career we've created increasingly feels like it no longer quite fits?

That question has been sticking with me because I think the common approach focuses on fixing something that isn’t broken. That may be exactly what makes the feeling so confusing.

What if the life we worked very hard to create was built around who we were at the time, what mattered then, and what life required of us?

What if the self-help books, therapy sessions, podcasts, conversations, and years of experience actually did what we hoped they would do? What if they helped us expand and grow in ways we couldn’t have imagined when we were younger and creating a vision for ourselves and our lives?

Years later, the life may still be good, comfortable, and well-earned, while the woman living it has changed.

Sometimes our dissatisfaction with something good surfaces because of a circumstance: a job becomes intolerable, a relationship reaches its limit, or our health demands something different.

Other times, nothing dramatic happens. Life works reasonably well while something else quietly begins to interest us. There is no crisis requiring a decision, just a growing awareness that something may have changed. And we start making soft sketches of an altered future.

When Curiosity Becomes a Plan for a Major Life Transition.

And this is where I notice another pattern: we are remarkably quick to turn that glimmer of interest into an if-then problem.

If I’m interested in this, then do I leave my job? If I want to spend more time somewhere else, am I talking about moving? If this no longer fits, then what am I going to do instead?

We go almost immediately from something has my attention to what is the plan?—and then on to all the things that could go wrong.

Of course it makes sense. These are women who have spent decades becoming very good at moving from problem to solution. But exploration is different from decisiveness. You can try on a possibility without making it your new identity. You can know that something wants to change before you know what the change should be.

There’s a school of thought that sees gratitude and desire as two sides of the same coin—that being deeply appreciative of what we have and still holding a strong desire for what we want to create do not have to be in conflict, and may even strengthen one another.

I like that idea and have been working on practicing the duality. It leaves room to appreciate the life you worked hard to create without making that appreciation the end of the story.

Linda Rhoads, PCC, is the founder of The Soul Spot. She offers Life Transition Coaching for people navigating meaningful changes in their lives, roles, and sense of identity.