What Happens When the Life You Built No Longer Fits You?

Image by Herbert Aust from Pixabay

Have you ever gotten to a place where it feels like you might finally belong and - boom - the foundations shift?

This is a pattern I’ve noticed in my life. It happened to me in the railway industry early in my career, where “jobs for life” and final-salary pensions had been a thing for half a century. Then came privatisation, restructures, redundancies.

I joined mobile telecommunications right as it was crossing a threshold: from an exciting, fast-growing space full of innovation, to something more like a public utility. By the early 2010s, smartphones were everywhere, and mobile had gone from being disruptive and new to being something everyone took for granted. But in the workplace, you could still feel the tension: people clinging to the past, to what the industry once was.

Then there were the relationship breakups. Years spent getting to know and becoming part of someone’s family, woven into the rhythm of their holidays and dinners and inside jokes, only to find, afterwards, that those people were no longer part of my life or identity. That kind of quiet erasure can shake you, even if no one else sees it.

And I became a parent at a time when it wasn’t just frowned upon to stay home and raise our kids, it was expected that we’d raise emotionally sound humans while also being a full-time career superwoman. The bar was impossibly high, and no matter which way I turned, it seemed I was falling short.

And now, I’m feeling it again, this time, in the world of writing.

After over a decade of sharing my personal growth journey on my blog, I’ve decided to finally write the book that’s been quietly forming in the background. But the landscape I’m stepping into looks nothing like the one I once imagined.

Writers are often introspective by nature. We reflect. We ponder. We retreat inward and write. Glennon Doyle once described it as something along the lines of sitting in our pyjamas, pouring our soul onto the page and freaking out if someone so much as knocks on the door. That’s the energy we bring: private, soul-searching, quietly making meaning from our lives.

And for a long time, that was enough. Writers wrote the book and publishers published and marketed the book, with the writers begrudgingly showing up to book signings and interviews.

But over the last 15 years, all of that has shifted. Today, writers are expected to arrive with a platform already built — an engaged audience, email lists, maybe even a proven track record in self-publishing. Publishers want you to be self marketed. And for many of us, it’s kind of overwhelming. It’s in the category of “which comes first, the book or the platform?”, so it can create a stalling effect as it’s completely at odds with the way we’re wired.

How do we live from the inside out in a world that constantly pulls us outward? To be visible. To be productive. To be measurable.

If you’ve ever felt that tension - between the soul’s pace and the world’s pace - then this isn’t just my story. It might be yours too.

The deeper pattern beneath all of these moments - the railway job dissolving, the telecoms shift, motherhood’s impossible expectations, breakups that feel like identity-loss, even the paralysis of trying to write a book in a platform-driven world - isn’t really about external instability.

It’s about how much we tether our sense of identity to things outside ourselves. And how jarring it feels when those “things” shift or disappear.

But the truth is, the world will keep shifting. Industries evolve. Relationships change. Roles morph. If our identity is built externally, we’re constantly at risk of collapse — like building on sand.

If our inner identity is strong and authentic, then the external circumstances might still change, but they won’t feel so catastrophic. Either they’ll match us — or they’ll simply pass through without shaking our foundation.

So maybe the work isn’t to find a place where the ground never shifts, maybe it’s to become someone who knows how to stand steady anyway.

To root ourselves not in roles, or titles, or approval, but in something deeper and quieter: who we are, beneath it all.

Because when that’s solid, change doesn’t undo us — it refines us.

And maybe, just maybe, it’s in the shifting that we finally learn where we truly belong.

What parts of your identity still depend on things that could change — and what might it feel like to come home to something steadier within? If everything around you shifted tomorrow, what would remain unshaken at your core? An what would it take for you to feel grounded, even when the ground keeps moving?

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