When uprooting myself can no longer help me transition
Any change in our lives requires a period of internal transition that can be extremely challenging. I’m looking for new ways to help me process changes in my life.
Transition points in my life have often been punctuated by travel. It is as though I need to physically move from one place to another to process the changes in my life. To transition away from one phase of my life and onto a new phase.
It was working with a coach for the first time that helped me to recognise this. He told me to read William Bridges’s book Transitions, before discussing it at one of our sessions. Bridges defines changes as things that happen to us, whether we choose them or not. A new boss, moving house, becoming a parent. Transition is a more internal process we go through to understand and come to terms with changes in our lives.
“Change is situational. Transition, on the other hand, is psychological. It is not those events, but rather the inner reorientation and self-redefinition that you have to go through in order to incorporate any of those changes into your life.”
William Bridges, Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes
I was struck by Bridges’s assertion that in modern, western societies we don’t have good ways of recognising the transition points in our lives. In indigenous cultures and across many religions, rituals and ceremonies act as markers for the move from childhood to adulthood, as well as other transition points in life. These support us to mark and work through lives various transitions.
“Transition always starts with an ending. To become something else, you have to stop being what you are now; to start doing things a new way, you have to end the way you are doing them now; and to develop a new attitude or outlook, you have to let go of the old.”
William Bridges, Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes
There are a range of activities in the book to help you reflect on transitions. One of these invites you to notice transition points in your life and how you responded to the end of one period and transitioned into the next, starting with the shift from being a child to an adolescent. This transition began for me in 1995 when I took part in an exchange trip to Romania. I was 14 and it was a huge leap out of the relative comfort of the Oxfordshire market town I grew up in.
Being a guest in a country still recovering from communist rule and the aftermath of the revolution that overthrew Ceaușescu had a profound impact on me. Children came up to us in our taxis asking for money, children who apparently lived in the sewers. Our exchange partners showed us where their brother had been shot during the revolution. You could buy vodka in a Ribena-style carton with a straw.
I was the youngest person on the trip and I was spending time with people who were mostly three years older than me and way cooler. I heard music I hadn’t heard, laid on a beach and watched shooting stars, and danced at open-air parties. I came home and bought my first Bjōrk album and a pair of Adidas Sambas. Small indicators of a bigger transition that was taking place.
At 18 I took a year off to work and travel. I wanted to learn about other people, places and ways of organising society and didn’t take the classic backpacker route. I started my trip in Cuba. I was keen to go there while Fidel Castro was still president.
It was really hard. There were times in the first couple of weeks when I was desperately homesick. The most state-of-the-art technology I had back then was a MiniDisc player. I’d had to fax my parents from a hotel business centre to let them know I’d arrived safely and that my bags had got lost in Paris. The one place to check the emails of an account I’d set up just weeks before was in the capitol building in the centre of Havana. You had to show your passport to gain access.
I’m currently listening to the audiobook of Gabrielle Zevin’s wonderful Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. I was caught by a line: “your sense of self could change depending on your location.” This is partly what travelling at this did to me. Who I was at home was so different to who I was in Cuba or Vietnam. How people saw me and interacted with me changed. I became more aware of what it meant to be an outsider. I was realising that I saw myself very differently from the way others did, that who I am changes depends so much on the context I am in.
The trip became happier. I met amazing people and went to incredible places. It was a journey that had a huge impact on me but at times I felt lost. Bridges describes this as the “natural process of disorientation and reorientation that marks the turning points in the path of growth.” I didn’t recognise it at the time but I was in a point of transition, working through the changes that being away from home for a long time was having on me and my sense of self.
I chose this disorientation. Deep down I knew I always had the opportunity to come home if I needed to. I appreciate that there is a great deal of privilege in seeking out changes that create challenge and discomfort. Very few people get to choose the changes that impact them and there is no safety net if it gets too hard, no quick fix to make things better.
At 29 I split up with a long-term girlfriend and I decided to leave what was a very good job at Westminster Council. I hadn’t yet recognised how I dealt with change and transition, so I didn’t make the connection between booking a train from London to Hong Kong as a way of dealing with these endings and creating new beginnings. My transitions have followed a pattern of surrounding myself with unfamiliar people in unfamiliar places.
After this long journey, I worked in Mysore, India for a year and again felt intense disorientation and reorientation. Memories of this came flooding back to me in recent weeks after a friend of mine took an unexpected trip to Mysore. Their Instagram stories were awash with the colours, sounds and places I associated with that time of transition.
It also had me reflecting on the life transition I most struggled with - becoming a parent. This transition wouldn’t be supported by a change of physical context. There wasn’t travel to mark the shedding of the old and the start of something new. Was this partly why it took me so long to process this change? It might be that becoming a parent is just too big of a change or maybe my ways of dealing with the psychological impact of change no longer serve me (if they ever did!)
There will be other changes in the years ahead, many of which I won’t be able to choose or predict. I need to find ways to work through these changes in a stage of life where I am more firmly planted. There needs to be space for disorientation and reorientation, without the need to uproot and completely change context. It might be that I can learn from the ceremonies designed to help personal transition that William Bridges references. Rather than moving away from my existing context and the people closest to me, I need to pull people towards me when I dealing with changes. This will hopefully provide me with the support I need to deal with the inevitable disorientation and reorientation of life's many transitions.
