Nobody talks about how lonely it gets

There's an elephant in the room for most women, and it's loneliness.

It arrives at the strangest times. Not always when you're by yourself; often when you're surrounded by people, in a room full of family, on a work call, standing in your own kitchen at ten past nine at night. And in my experience, it turns up most reliably in the middle of an identity shift - In The Hollowing.

You might notice it as feeling isolated, or that your friendships have quietly thinned out and you're not sure when that happened. Or perhaps something harder to say out loud: that you don't recognise yourself anymore.

This isn't about a changed schedule or a new pattern, rather it goes so much deeper than that. It is the ‘who am I?’ question, which often sits underneath everything and doesn’t simply go away when you are busy.

What most of us tend to do when this question lands is look backwards. We search for a version of ourselves we do recognise, a woman we remember being. We start scraping our way back to her, denying gravity and all it holds dear.

I understand the instinct completely, and very personally infact. That version of her was clear. She knew who she was, what she liked and what she was doing. Naturally, you seek her for comfort.

But the thing noone says is you can’t get back there. There will still be sparks of her in you, real ones, but she's gone, and the only way through is forwards. There is a lot of grief in this. Often, I think, unacknowledged, and it is not a small thing to mention in passing. This is actual, ‘for real life’ grief.

Moving through The Hollowing asks three things of you, and they're not quick or easy.

First, Acknowledging the state you're in. Not fixing it yet. Just naming it honestly. “I am in the middle of something and I don't have hold of it”

Next, Grieving her. The version of you that's ending and that deserves to be mourned properly rather than skipped past.

Lastly, Growing into acceptance. Understanding that you can carry the beautiful parts of her with you - the learnings, the humour, the things she got right - and also that you will never fully be her again.

Once you've done that, and only really once you've done that, the questions change. They stop looking backwards and start pointing somewhere useful: Who am I becoming? What does that version of me actually enjoy? What's happening in my life right now that I could let go of, to properly step into her?

Here's the bit I want more women to know. You will do this more than once.

I believe we go through at least half a dozen identity shifts in a lifetime, and that's before we even get to menopause - which is a physiological, biological, mental, emotional and spiritual shift all at once, and an identity shift in its own right.

Nobody tells us how to handle these shifts or how to pay for them, how long they last, how to navigate them. Socially, we're expected to work it out on our own. Put a smile on and carry on.

That's outdated, and I think we all agree we are done with it.

The first step is simply acknowledging that identity shifts happen. They can be triggered by grief, loss, by a new job, a new career, or having no idea what you want to do next. By becoming a mother. By becoming a grandmother. Any of these can set one off. It might be subtle. It might arrive with an announcement. It might feel like a breakdown or a breakthrough and often it's very hard to tell which.

It might feel lonely, I suspect it usually does. Almost every conversation I have with a woman sitting in this place runs the same way: I feel alone, I'm not sure about anything, and I'm trying to get back to who I was.

So my question to you is: What if you didn’t have to resolve it yet? What if it's okay to sit in the not-knowing of an identity shift? What if it's okay to feel alone and not want to feel alone? What if you can want the old version of yourself back and want the new one at the same time - both, at once? And what if it's okay to not know how to get through the next one, even if you've navigated one before, consciously and well?

We're not supposed to have all the rules. There is no rulebook, no guidebook, no instruction manual for this. What I do know is that these shifts will keep coming, and that what makes the difference is having the right support around you when they do.

Support might be community. It might be phoning one friend who gets it. It might be retreating into yourself for a while, which is a legitimate choice and not a failure. All of these are okay, and perhaps sometimes it's several of them at different times. What matters is the same either way: acknowledging the change, letting go of what has been, and welcoming in whatever is coming.

The loneliest part of all of this is thinking you're the only one.

That's the bit that does the damage. Not the change itself, but the conviction and assuredness that everyone else has managed this without falling apart, and you're the one who's lost the thread.

I promise you, you haven’t. I know this from my own experience and I have this conversation constantly. Different women, different triggers, near-identical words.

So if you take one thing from this: the feeling is real, and the story it's telling you about yourself is not true. You don't have to fix it this week, nor do you have to know who you're becoming yet. You just don't have to sit in it on your own, which is the whole reason Reground exists, and why the workshops happen in a room with other women rather than one-to-one.

Vision, then Clarity, then Becoming. Two hours each, in the Scottish Borders. But that's a conversation for another day.

For now, if this sounded like your life at the moment, the door's open. Stacey x