The reorganization happening underneath
I’ve had hundreds of people sit across from me and describe their lives falling apart. Some version of their marriage has become unrecognizable, or their job has stopped making any sense, or their faith they grew up inside has gone hollow on them. And they can’t explain a bit of it to the people who love them. Some of them are genuinely coming apart. Others are doing something else entirely, and the only way they found out which one it was is by looking backward.
In the middle of my own version of this years ago, I heard that we can’t make sense of our lives by looking forward. The only way to understand any of it is to connect the dots looking backwards. While in the moment you are simply inside the confusion. A year or two later you can see the shape of what was happening, and sometimes what you see is that something had been reorganizing underneath the whole time.
What often turns out to be happening is that the person stopped performing. They had been playing a role for a long time, probably since childhood, and one day the role stopped fitting. The status quo quit satisfying them. The behaviors they used to absorb from other people stopped being acceptable. They became unwilling to keep playing the game they had always played in order to keep the peace, and the ho-hum life they had been calling contentment didn’t work for them anymore.
None of that registers as growth to the people standing around them.
You stop laughing at the joke that was never funny, you stop absorbing the comment that always stung, and you stop volunteering for the thing you resented volunteering for every year. You say your true feelings at a family dinner instead of the thing that keeps everyone comfortable. From the inside this feels like relief showing up about twenty years late. From the outside, to the people who have been closest to you for years, it looks like something has gone wrong with you.
So people start telling you they are worried. They say you have changed, that you are not yourself lately, that they miss who you used to be. They ask your spouse if you are okay, and they wonder aloud whether this is a phase, or a crisis, or something they should be doing something about.
Good.
The version of you they miss was the one who never made anything harder for them. Of course they miss him. He was easier to be around.
There is a scene in The Matrix where Morpheus offers Neo two pills. The blue one ends the story, and Neo wakes up in his own bed and goes on believing whatever he wants to believe. The red one keeps him in it, and he finds out how far down the whole thing actually goes. Neo takes the red one.
The part that matters comes after. Once he has seen the matrix for what it is, the blue pill stops being available to him. There is no route back to the version of himself who didn’t know. That door closed the moment he looked.
Almost nobody I work with experiences their own version of that moment as a choice. They describe it as something that happened to them. They saw something they couldn’t unsee, usually about their family or their marriage or the institution they had given twenty years to, and afterward the old arrangement couldn’t be reassembled no matter how much they wanted it back. And some of them wanted it back badly.
Which brings up the part people are least prepared for, which is that all of this feels like grief, because it is grief.
Our culture handles grief badly, and one reason is that almost nobody is taught what grief actually covers. We treat it as something reserved for funerals, for the death of a person we loved, as though that were the only loss that qualifies. Grief shows up any time we lose something that mattered to us. A marriage, a job, a body that used to work the way it used to, a faith, a friendship, a version of the future you had been counting on. It may be the most common human experience there is, and it is the one we are taught the least about.
You are losing a version of yourself that a lot of people liked, along with relationships that only worked while you were performing. You are also losing a story about your life that made sense of everything up to now, and there’s nothing standing ready to replace it. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross gave us the language of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, and all five of them show up here, usually in no particular order and often more than once.
Nobody warns you what that actually feels like from the inside. You can be fine on Tuesday and wrecked on Wednesday over something small. Acceptance arrives, something settles, and then a week later you are back in anger with no idea how you got there. It moves like a rollercoaster, and when you have never been told that this is how grief moves, the natural conclusion is that you are going crazy. I have never understood why we do not explain this to people. A explanation about grief would save them months of wondering what is wrong with them.
David Kessler worked alongside Kübler-Ross for years, and after his own son died he added a sixth stage. He called it making meaning. His argument is that acceptance was never supposed to be the destination, and that people who arrive there and stop tend to stay stuck, carrying the loss without ever finding anything to do with it. Making meaning is what lets a person hold what happened and keep moving forward.
Almost everyone I have watched go through this says some version of the same thing once they reach that sixth stage. Getting to acceptance was never enough. Acceptance was where the suffering stopped getting worse. Making meaning was where something started being built.
If you are currently in the middle of a collapse that doesn’t feel like reorganization in any way at all, you may be reading this and finding nothing in it that matches your experience. Nothing is being built underneath. There is no pattern to see. There is just the wreckage, and the idea that the universe is preparing you for something reads as an insult to what you are actually living through. If that is where you are, I want you to know that the person in the middle usually can’t tell which one they are in, and that includes me and it includes the people who write confidently about this sort of thing. Some collapses are just collapses. Some of them need a doctor or a hospital or somebody who can sit with you tonight, and no reframe substitutes for that. Please go get the help. The meaning, if it comes, comes much later and it never arrives on schedule.
For everyone else, here is what the looking backward eventually shows you.
You spent a long time being unknowingly steered toward comfort. Your nervous system was doing its job, scanning everything for what was safe and moving you toward it, and for most of your life comfort and safety were the same thing. Keeping the peace was safe, not rocking the boat was safe, and being who everyone expected was safe. That system ran you for decades and it was right to.
Somewhere in the falling apart, the steering changed. You stopped organizing your life around comfort and started organizing it around whether something was true, or whether it mattered, or whether you could live with yourself for doing it. That is a different operating principle entirely, and it explains why the people who knew the old you find the new one so unsettling. You are running on something they have not converted to.
The adventure you have been called into was never going to be a comfortable one. What it offers instead is purpose, which is a poor trade at first and then a priceless one eventually.
That reordering is the reorganization, and it is going on underneath while the surface of your life looks like it is coming apart. Your values are resorting themselves. Things you tolerated for twenty years are becoming intolerable, and things that frightened you are becoming possible. Capacity you didn’t have is being built out of the same material that is currently wrecking you. None of it announces itself, which is why the falling apart is all anybody can see, including you.
What lets a person cooperate with that, rather than only endure it, is a willingness to consider that the universe might be up to something. The willingness asks that you stay open enough to notice if something meaningful shows up, and that you entertain the possibility that this stretch may be doing something rather than only taking something.
Willingness by itself will not get you there, though. Plenty of people reach acceptance and sit in it for years without ever arriving at making meaning, because meaning has to be built and building requires participation. The people who get there are the ones who decided to engage with what happened to them instead of waiting for it to resolve on its own.
The engagement is simpler than it sounds. You pay attention, and you get curious about your own story instead of only suffering it. You start asking how you got here and what the pattern has been, which is the same work as connecting the dots backward, done on purpose instead of by accident years later. Being deliberate about your attention matters here, because in a season like this it will go to the wreckage by default and find plenty to look at. And you leave room for the odd coincidence, the conversation that lands strangely, the book that shows up at exactly the right time, without immediately explaining any of it away.
Do that long enough and something gives. A glimmer of hope, or a sliver of space where meaning can sneak in. It is small and easy to miss, and it’s also the first evidence that the reorganization has been going on underneath the whole time.
The dots only ever connect looking backward. The people who eventually see the line are the ones who stayed awake while there was still nothing to see.
Peace my friends,
~Travis
Up next week: What Coherence Actually Feels Like
This essay is part of a year-long weekly exploration of how we become who we are, and why change often begins in places we were never taught to look.
