Nobody Warns You How Lonely Getting Better Can Be
Nobody warns you about how lonely getting better can be.
You finally start setting boundaries. Finding your own integrity. Figuring out what you actually want. And then there’s this space — between the before and after — where what surrounded you is no more, but what’s in front of you isn’t here yet either.
It is incredibly easy to look around at your shrinking circle and think, I must be doing something wrong.
You might expect that personal growth is supposed to feel positive. That it’s supposed to look like good vibes and connection. So when you start outgrowing people — or outgrowing the version of you that used to fit perfectly into their expectations — it starts to feel like you made a mistake.
But here’s what I want you to hear, and I want you to hear it before we go any further:
The loneliness doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong. It means you are in the in-between. The unknown, unclear, messy middle.
it is one of the most painful places you can be and I’m going to tell you how to get through it.
I was 30 years old, sitting at the top of Mount Storm King in Washington State. It was near the end of the day. The sun was going down, a quiet fog setting in. Everyone else had made their way home. I’d just finished one of the most difficult hikes I’d ever done — uphill the entire way, rope scrambles, the kind of trail that asks you if you’re sure about every ten minutes because what sounds real better right now is not this.
I was two weeks into a solo camping trip after separating from my partner of ten years.
A group of kids from out-of-state came up to join me at the summit. We chatted a bit and got to know each other a little. And one of them unknowingly threw a profound banger my way as he observed where I was as “the third stage of my life.”
Because they were right. I’d moved past school, then found someone and built a life. And then that life ended. And now I was standing on a mountain in the fog, at the beginning of something that didn’t have a shape yet.
The third part of my life.
I’ve thought about how life is built in chapters a lot since then. And how that same guy dubbed me the Seattle Mountain Goat.
What I lived through I eventually learned has a name.
William Bridges called it the Neutral Zone. In his book Transitions, he lays out what happens when life changes faster than your identity can keep up: you end what was, you enter the middle, and eventually you begin again. Found, lost, found.
This loneliness is the middle part before you’re found again, where everything falls apart. And where, if you let it, everything gets rebuilt.
Here’s what I think most people don’t understand about this middle: it’s coming for you.
Sometimes because you chose to grow, and sometimes because life made the choice for you. A relationship ends. A career collapses. Something you built your identity around simply stops being true. And suddenly you’re between who you were and who you haven’t become yet, whether you signed up for it or not.
Now — you can refuse it. You can stay in “found.” You can hold tight the shape of who you are today and what you know. But that choice has a cost: you have to keep starving yourself for the comfort of your tiny walls.
You have to keep saying no to the parts of you that are trying to grow because growing means entering a space you can’t control. And most people will make that trade for years — sometimes their whole lives — because the known feels safer than the unknown.
Or you believe you can skip the middle entirely. That growth goes from one version of settled to the next without the shit in between — like a quick flash in a montage. You expect the glow-up without the discomfort. And you believe growth can happen without the seeds we sow in our own pain.
The middle is the whole point.
As far as when and how this appears, this model doesn’t always happen in clean stages. From my own experience it was more like found → lost → what I thought led to found → still a bit lost → maybe this is it → no, still lost.
Then something that felt like close to found again — until something else challenged it.
And I’ve noticed something more: as I actively pursue growth, the more ambiguous the cycle becomes. Where the peaks and valleys of it all don’t go away, but they’re an out-of-focus blur of the process. Found doesn’t become a destination anymore and lost feels more like a chosen-wander. It’s just all together and part of it, largely I think as a result of staying in a state of growth and challenging yourself as often as you can.
Early on, the neutral zone felt like a mountain top crashing toward the Mariana Trench into what felt truly lost. Now I have a stronger instinct of where I am and where I’m going and there is a familiarity and comfort in it all.
I think that’s because when growth happens to you, it is uninvited, unwanted, challenging the comfort of being in a world you know — then you’re just in freefall with no frame for what’s happening.
But the more you choose to grow, the more you recognize the terrain. Not because it gets easy. Because you’ve survived it before. And that survival becomes its own kind of evidence.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I remember being in the bathroom at work.
I was embarrassed. Crying. And I couldn’t escape my thoughts: Why did I do this? Why couldn’t I do this better? Why am I such a fuckup? What if I never find what I had, or what I want?
That last one held the terror about the future. What if this is just what my life is now?
What if I made a mistake?
I wanted my old life as I envisioned it at its best. That’s what I remember most. Not certainty, even. Just comfort — even the illusion of it. Just the feeling that something was familiar and safe. Because the absence of that is just the raw exposure of being alone with a life that no longer had its old shape.
And so I did what a lot of people do. I tried to fix it.
I made choices I wasn’t ready for. To make this process stop; to move past it ASAP; to make it to the promised land everyone kept saying existed.
This is where your insecurities and faults project onto your decisions. You want to prove that’s not you. They feel urgent and obvious from the inside but are visibly wrong from the outside.
They’re not the right paths. Some of them have real consequences. But they’re part of how you test yourself.
I didn’t see that when I was in the middle of it. I do now. It doesn’t make someone feel better to know they are where they are supposed to be — when the only thing around them is pain.
But I do want to affirm that being in this middle part doesn’t mean you did something wrong to deserve it.
Because when you’re in this middle part — alone and confused — the most natural thing in the world is to treat your pain as proof that you failed. Everyone else seems to have figured this out. Everyone else seems to be moving forward. And here you are, crying again, unable to explain to anyone what’s even wrong because the answer is: everything changed and I don’t know who I am right now.
That loneliness feels personal.
But you’re not alone because you’re the problem. You’re alone because you’re in a passage that, by its nature, no one else can walk for you. And the fact that it hurts this much isn’t a sign that you did something wrong — it’s a sign that what you left behind mattered to you, and what you’re walking toward matters to you, and you’re standing in the gap between the two.
What feels like failure is the cost of actually growing.
While you move toward the next stage of your life, the practice in self-compassion has to do real work in two different places.
The first is the acute moment in the middle of the day when you’re alone and the voice in your head is saying what if I never find myself. In that moment, you’re in pain, and the only question is whether you beat yourself up for being in pain — or whether you let yourself be there.
That means: do not judge yourself for missing the comfort of what you left behind. Do not judge yourself for wanting to go back. Do not treat your grief for what you lost as weakness.
Let it hurt without turning the hurt into evidence that you’re broken.
The second is slower. It’s the ongoing frustration of being in the middle longer than you want or expected.
You’re trying. Nothing’s clicking yet. Other people seem to move through this faster. You expected that by now something would have happened for you, surely it would have — and it hasn’t. And you start to wonder if you’re just stuck.
This is when self-compassion looks more like endurance.
And here’s the part I want to be honest about: I don’t know how long the middle takes. I don’t know how long this lasts for you or what your valleys and peaks entail.
It takes what it takes.
I hold something to be true that I know won’t comfort you right now — that you will find where you’re supposed to be when you’re supposed to be there. I know how unhelpful it sounds from the inside. I’m offering it as something I hold for you until you can hold it for yourself.
The self-compassion is the closest you can get to peace and acceptance while you’re still in the middle of it.
So, you’re in it — what do you actually do?
One option is to wait. Wait for clarity. Wait for the right moment. Wait until you know who you’re becoming before you take a step.
But clarity doesn’t come from waiting or preparing. It comes from action.
Dave Evans in his work with Stanford’s Life Design Lab talks about this as prototyping — small experiments without a thesis. Not grand pivots. Not strategic moves. Just: try something. Talk to someone new. Say yes to something for no reason. Go sit somewhere unfamiliar for an hour. Respond to one person differently than you normally would.
Now — your response may be that, in pursuit of your destination, this seems rather akin to throwing shit against a wall and seeing what sticks. And honestly? It is.
But here’s what’s hard to accept: directionless is actually the more direct path.
Because while you think the better path is straight from A-to-Z, what that really looks like is waiting for certainty before you move. It isn’t short at all. In reality, the most direct path is the one that bounces around, side-to-side, back and forth — because you are human.
And the pace is yours. You can make more experiments and it can accelerate. But it doesn’t have to. No one else is grading your speed of transformation. If all you can manage today is getting out of bed and being kind to yourself about the fact that getting out of bed was hard — that’s not stagnation. That’s someone who’s still in it, still moving, and still here.
The only thing that matters is that you keep moving. That you don’t give up and fall into hopelessness.
I want to tell you how long this takes but I can’t. None of my growth felt like growing at the time. You never know it’s happening until you look back.
Right now it feels like nothing is happening. Like you’re standing still while everyone else moves forward. You’re waiting for the morning you wake up and it all finally clicks into place.
But the ache in you is the growth.
Nobody warns you that getting better can feel this lonely. But nobody tells you this part either: you were never supposed to feel positive right now.
You were just supposed to feel.