Nobody warns you about the weight of shedding skin—how leaving the life you’ve outgrown feels like drowning in reverse, gasping not for air but for identity. The silence presses against your ribs. The awkwardness clings like humidity. The loneliness echoes in rooms that used to hold your certainties.

You exist suspended between who you were and who you’re becoming, caught in the gossamer threads of transformation. Your old self haunts the periphery—familiar but foreign, like a photograph of someone you once knew intimately. The new self whispers promises from shadows, always just beyond reach.

Here, in this liminal space, gravity shifts. Old habits drag at your ankles like chains forged from years of repetition, while new ones flutter overhead like paper birds—beautiful but weightless, refusing to land. Every choice becomes archaeology: you excavate layers of yourself, discarding what no longer serves, polishing what might endure.

The grief surprises you most. You mourn routines that suffocated you, relationships that diminished you, versions of yourself that were never quite right. Yet your heart aches for their familiar ache, the way a body misses pain once it’s gone. Each morning arrives with its interrogation: Is this even working? Will I recognize myself when the dust settles?

But listen—this shapelessness isn’t failure. It’s metamorphosis in its messiest form, the stretch marks of becoming. You’re not wandering in circles; you’re spiraling upward, each revolution bringing you closer to the surface. The person you’re meant to be has been waiting in your marrow all along, patient as geological time.

You are not lost. You are liquid. You are potential incarnate. And the stranger in the mirror—the one whose eyes hold storms and possibilities in equal measure—they are closer than they have ever been.