I've been in my own self study around love.

Not the kind of love that gets sold to us in Disney movies or romantic comedies… The one true person, the wedding, being chosen. But what love actually is. What it means to give it, to receive it, to stand inside it.

That question brought me to the work of Erich Fromm. To bell hooks. And to this.

In her book Communion: The Female Search for Love, hooks writes: "Not enough has been written about the transition period women go through when we let go of old agendas for our lives and begin to embark on new journeys."

I read that and something in me exhaled. Because she named what I have been exploring in myself and with hundreds of women over the years but was never able to name as eloquently as she can.

What I want to explore here, with more questions than expertise, is this transition. This season. The one that doesn't have enough literature, enough maps, enough honest conversation around it.

I am not coming to you with answers. I am coming to you as a woman who has been in it. Who is still in it. And who gets to sit with hundreds of women who are in it too.

Most of us were given a very clear map from a very young age about how to be successful. How to do life right.

Go to school. Get the degrees. Find the person. Get married. Have the kids. Be happy.

And so many of us did exactly that. We followed it well. Some of us followed it perfectly.

And then something happened. Life came in. Or intuition came in. Or the quiet, persistent feeling that something is missing, not broken, just... missing, became too loud to ignore.

Erica Jong, quoted by hooks, calls women like us pathfinders. Women being forced to redefine the second half of our lives. To chart something new.

The uncomfortable truth about being a pathfinder. There is no path.

I see her in many forms.

She is the woman who wants to leave her marriage because she is so unsatisfied. She is in the relationship playing "should I stay or should I go" on a loop in the back of her mind. Quietly and constantly. She is the one who is single and done settling, genuinely unsure if a man who can hold her complexity actually exists. And she is the one somewhere in between, in a relationship that is fine, which somehow feels worse than if it were broken.

She is the woman who already left the career. The successful one, the one that looked great from the outside, because she couldn't keep doing it anymore. And now here she is, trying to build something new, which is beautiful and courageous and probably more true. There is a lot of discomfort that comes with that. Because there isn't the same clean map like the one that got her here. There is this expectation that you will lead with the same level of success you left with. If you were making six figures, that feels like it should be the starting point. If you had momentum, a network, a reputation, it's hard to have a beginner's mind. It's hard to start from scratch when you've already been somewhere.

She is also the woman who is searching. Who wants the "something else" but doesn't quite know what that is. Only that she is clear it is not what she has been living.

And she is the woman who already has the vision. Who is already leading and growing within her new direction. She doesn't want to build it from the old beliefs. The patriarchy, the fear, the more is more, the top down authority. She is trying to do it differently. And that is its own kind of disorienting.

And she is doing all of this while taking care of everyone else. Aging parents on one side. Little ones on the other. Determined, fiercely and consciously determined, to do it differently than it was done to her. So her kids don't suffer the same way she did. Which is its own kind of exhausting and its own kind of beautiful.

Underneath all of it, no matter which version of her she is, there is a texture I recognize.

A low grade dissatisfaction. A feeling of just slightly missing the mark. Sometimes a low grade anxiety. An unshakable need for certainty. The need for a guarantee. Because she was pseudo promised a safe life if she followed all the rules. If she played the game. If she did what she was told. And there was a level of safety in that, unconscious maybe, but real. And now she is coming to grips with the fact that it was never actually guaranteed. That plenty of people have played the game, have it all, and are still not satisfied.

And then there is the grief.

Grief for the life she left. Grief for the version of herself that followed the rules so well. Grief for the promise itself, the one that was never real but she believed in anyway. And that particular loneliness of watching people who are still playing the game and looking, from the outside, like they're winning. That is a specific kind of alone. Not just lonely. The loneliness of having woken up to something you cannot unsee while the people around you are still asleep.

And then the one foot in, one foot out. I am not going to do this thing unless I know there is going to be an ROI. Unless I know it is going to work. Always a part that says: well, I could go back to the teaching job. I could go back to the corporate salary. And then another part that shuts it down immediately: hell no. We hate that.

This is what it looks like to be in this season. This in between. This transition that not enough has been written about.

Want to keep reading? The full piece, including what seems to help and the questions I am sitting with, is over on Substack.

Read the rest here.

If this landed for you, and you are somewhere in this season yourself, I made something for you.

It's called Nothing Is Wrong With You. It's a free audio series and it's a good place to start. You can find it here.

And if you are ready to stop navigating this alone, you can apply for coaching here. I work with a small number of women at a time and I would love to hear from you.

Want to go deeper into the parts work? I broke down the IFS analysis of this exact transition on YouTube. You can watch it here.