Change Happens to You. Transitions is Something You Move Through

A book I've been sitting with recently is William Bridges' Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes. I read something I hadn't realised there was a difference.

Change and transition aren't the same thing.

Change is external. It happens to you. A job ends, a relationship ends, a chapter closes. Transition is the internal process of adapting to it. And here's something that many people skip: transition doesn't start with a new beginning. It starts with an ending.

How well you end something determines how fully you can begin the next thing.

Why we rush the ending

When something ends, especially something painful, the instinct is to move through it as quickly as possible. People encourage you to move on. You tell yourself you should be further along than this. The discomfort of sitting with it feels like weakness.

So we give anger a lot of oxygen. We give grief very little.

We're not used to allowing ourselves to feel what an ending actually asks us to feel. The processing. The acceptance. The acknowledgement that this happened, it was hard, perhaps you weren't ready for it, and it's done.

Some people move through that relatively quickly. For many, it takes much longer. And the length of time usually isn't about the ending itself. It's about the fear on the other side of it. The fear of the unknown. The fear of rejection. The fear of taking a step that might not work out.

Staying stuck is familiar. The next chapter isn't. And so people stay. Stay angry, stay doing the same thing (applying for endless jobs), stay disappointed, stay hurt.

The Neutral Zone that doesn't feel neutral

William Bridges calls the space between ending and new beginning the Neutral Zone. Which to me feels like a generous name for what it actually feels like.

It's heavy. It's disorienting. You're no longer who you were and not yet who you're becoming. There's nothing to hold on to and nothing to move toward yet.

I've been in this place. One of the longest relationships of my earlier life ended, and the people around me encouraged me to move on. I tried. I went on dates. I told myself I was fine and that it was time.

But I was still comparing. Still measuring every new experience against the old one. Still carrying something I hadn't put down properly. It wasn't fair to the people I was meeting. And it wasn't working.

When I finally stopped trying to fast-forward and gave myself permission to actually feel what that ending meant, things shifted. I went back to myself. I focused on my health (I boxed 🥊 and became the fittest version of myself), my mental state, and the things that were mine. I allowed the feelings rather than outrunning them.

That process prepared me to connect with people differently. Not just in relationships. In everything.

Transitions can be as painful or as enlightening as we allow them to be. That's not a platitude. It's a genuine choice about how we show up in the in-between.

How to properly end something

There's an exercise I was guided through when I was navigating a significant ending of my own. I want to share it because it changed how I understand what a proper ending requires.

Three questions. Sit with each one honestly.

What did I give to this chapter? Name it. The effort, the care, the version of yourself you brought to it.

What did this chapter give to me? Not just the good parts. All of it. What did it teach you, even if the lessons were hard?

What do I need back from it in order to move forward?

That last question is the one most people skip. It asks you to name what you're still holding onto. What you haven't yet released. What closure would actually require.

The process of doing this, genuinely and with someone who can hold the space for it, isn't small. But it's what makes a new beginning possible rather than just inevitable.

You'll know you've properly ended something when you can hear news about it, about the consequences of decisions you warned about, about the people involved, without feeling the same weight you once did. Not indifference. Just distance. That's not numbness. That's what I call freedom.

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I've been in a relationship for ten years and started my own business (you know as well as I do the ups and downs that come with it). The skills I built in that Neutral Zone, not abandoning myself, processing honestly, communicating rather than comparing, didn't just help me move on. They changed how I show up in everything.

Honestly, though, these aren't skills you learn once and then have. Every new transition tests them again. How willing are you to hold to what matters? How willing are you to show up in the way that's needed?

These are questions that don't stop.

Change is constant. Transition is the work you choose to do in response to it.

If you made it to the end, reply to this email and tell me what's come up for you.

With you,

Linda

Founder of Touching Distance