What Changing Your Life Actually Looks Like From the Inside
Not a before-and-after. More like a during — messy, uncertain, and still very much ongoing.
We love the transformation story with clear chapters.
The before, where everything was wrong or stuck or insufficient. The moment of realisation, usually dramatic in the retelling. The work, compressed into a montage. The after, where everything is different and the person is standing in good light looking at peace with themselves.
I’ve read a lot of these stories. I’ve told a version of mine. But the thing about transformation stories is that you can only really tell them cleanly once you’re out the other side — and I’m not out the other side. I’m in the middle of it. Which means what I can offer you is not the polished retrospective version. It’s the messy, uncertain, still-unresolved current-tense version.
That turns out to be more useful, I think.
The thing nobody tells you about changing your life — genuinely changing it, not just adjusting the furniture — is that there’s a long period where it’s not obvious whether you’re changing it or just chaotically disrupting it.
You make a decision. A real one. Not “I should probably” but an actual committed choice that costs something. And then you discover that the decision, however real, doesn’t automatically reorganise everything else. The old patterns are still there. The old fears are still operational. The gap between what you’ve decided and what you can currently execute is large enough to be discouraging.
This is the bit that comes after the dramatic moment of realisation and before the montage. The bit where you’re doing the work but it’s not showing up yet. Where you have to keep acting on the decision in the absence of visible evidence that it was the right one.
I’ve found myself, more than once in the last few months, having to “get back on board.”
That phrase matters. Getting back on board implies you’ve temporarily not been on the board. That there’s been a period of drift, distraction, discouragement — and then a return. Not a triumphant return. Just a quiet, practical one. Getting back to the work. Putting one thing in front of another again.
I don’t think transformation is linear. I think it looks more like a Kanban board that’s constantly getting columns added — things coming in faster than they’re going out, priorities shifting, dependencies that you didn’t see until you were already committed somewhere else. Messy, human, workable.
The people who make it through that middle period — and not everyone does — seem to share one quality: they have some tolerance for uncertainty about the outcome. They can keep working without needing the evidence that it’s working yet. They can hold the decision while the results are still forming.
What nobody tells you about changing your life is that the version of yourself you’re becoming is not available for consultation while you’re becoming them.
You can’t ask the future version of you whether this is worth it. You can’t borrow their certainty to get through the current difficult stretch. You’re operating on faith — the kind of faith that isn’t religious or mystical but practical: I believe this is working even though I can’t yet see it working, so I’ll keep going.
This is partly why having a record matters. I review my voice memos from six months ago sometimes, and I’m startled by what was already in process that I couldn’t see as process at the time. The building was happening. The infrastructure was forming. I just couldn’t see it from inside it.
That’s the nature of the during.
If you’re in the middle of a creative life change right now — whether you’re early in it, or deep in it, or questioning whether you’re making progress at all — I want to say this clearly: the fact that it’s messy is not evidence that it’s not working. The fact that it’s uncertain is not evidence that you made the wrong decision. The fact that you sometimes need to “get back on board” doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It means you’re in the actual transformation, not the version of it that gets made into a tidy story afterward.
The before-and-after narrative is useful for selling things. The during is what life actually looks like.
You’re in the during. So am I. We’re both still going, which is the main thing.
And here’s the thing about the Kanban board analogy I mentioned: the whole point of the system isn’t to have nothing on it. It’s to have visibility. To know what’s in motion, what’s blocked, what needs attention. The chaos isn’t the problem — the invisible chaos is the problem. Once you can see it, you can work with it.
That’s all I’m trying to do, really. Make it visible. Work with it. Keep going.
Where are you in your own transformation? Not in the tidy retrospective version — in the actual current-tense experience of it? I’d genuinely like to know. Reply and tell me what the “during” looks like for you.
CP52 Stage: Stage 2 — The Decision (committing to the creative path)
Series: The Transformation Series
Image note: A Kanban board with too many columns. Or a half-packed bag — not ready to leave, not yet arrived.
