The Messy Middle Is Not a Sign You're Doing It Wrong

Nobody warns you about the grief of changing when nothing is actually broken.

Not the grief of loss. Not the grief of failure. The grief of growing beyond something that was genuinely good. Something you built, loved, chose. Something that fit perfectly until one day it just didn't anymore.

And the pull toward something new starts getting louder.

You take steps toward it. It gets scary and disorienting in a way you weren't expecting. You pull back. Step into what's familiar. And there's real relief in that, yes, I know this place, I'm safe here. But after a little while something feels not quite right again. Not bad. Just not quite yours anymore.

Like a coat that used to fit perfectly. Still a great coat. It just doesn't fit the body you're in now.

And you're standing there going, do I try again? Or do I stay?

Sometimes you do this dance more than once. A lot of times, even. The back and forth, the new pulling you forward, the old pulling you back, and neither one fits just right. And in that in-between space your mind starts making meaning out of the discomfort. It activates the old stories. Things like:

If this were really for me, it would feel easier.

I keep going back so I must not be ready.

Maybe this is a sign I'm supposed to stay.

These stories feel reasonable. Logical. Responsible, even. Your mind is doing its job. Trying to keep you safe. Trying to make sense of something that doesn't feel familiar yet.

But here's what I've seen over two decades of sitting with women in their hardest moments. The discomfort is in the dance. It's not a sign you're doing something wrong. It's a sign something real is happening. Shifting. Changing. And that messy middle, as awkward and weird as it is, that's where you grow.

I know this one personally.

For over twenty years I built my massage therapy practice, Essence of Health. I showed up with my hands and my heart for people I genuinely loved. That practice was a baby of mine. It saw me through births and graduations, hard seasons and good ones. It carried me and my family through things I couldn't have anticipated when I started.

Being an entrepreneur cracked me open in a way I didn't know existed. I got to be present with my clients through their own expansions and losses and wins and hardships in a way that not many people get to be. I built it from the ground up. I was good at it. I loved it.

And I had a dream that kept growing and changing and evolving until I couldn't ignore it anymore. A dream that required a different version of me than the one I had been living.

But the guilt of changing and letting go of something so good, something I had poured so much into, almost stopped me from doing it at all. Leaving my clients. Taking a risk with my family's financial security. Stepping away from the work and the identity I had built for twenty-plus years.

Who was I to want something different? And who was I to put my family at risk for a dream?

In 2020, my mom passed from cancer.

In those final moments, a nurse said something to me I have never forgotten.

She said: You can feel relief and grief at the same time.

If you've ever watched someone you love go through something long and hard, you understand what she meant. And you might also understand the guilt that comes with that relief. The way you can love someone completely and still feel something like relief when the suffering ends. And then feel ashamed of the relief.

Nurse Rachel gave me permission to hold both. To not have to choose. To let them exist together without one canceling the other.

I've said those words to so many people since. Because they're true in so many moments, not just in death, but in everyday transitions. The ordinary crossroads we don't always have language for.

A few years later, standing in my own messy middle, letting go of the massage therapy piece of my business and stepping toward something that terrified me as much as it called to me, I heard her words in a completely different way.

You can feel the excitement and the grief at the same time.

You can be ready for the new and still grieve what you're leaving.

Both can be true. Both were true. Some days they still are. I look back at that season with so much gratitude, the beauty and the messiness and the hard work and the relationships. And I feel genuinely excited for what's growing now. For who I'm becoming.

Both. At the same time.

Giving myself permission to feel both changed everything.

So if you are grieving what you're leaving, that ache, that pull, that heaviness, that is not evidence you're making a wrong choice. It's evidence that what you're leaving was real. That it mattered. That you loved it. That you built or experienced or lived something genuinely worth grieving.

You're not changing because it was broken. You're not changing because you failed.

You're changing because you're growing. Because something requires a different version of you. And that version is calling.

The dance is not failure. That back and forth, that uncertainty, one foot in and one foot out, it's not proof you haven't grown enough or done enough for the new thing to work. Life isn't static. Nothing stays exactly the same. We are not meant to arrive somewhere and never feel the pull backward, never have the fear get loud, never have old patterns show up like they never left.

That's just being human.

When you're in the dance and you don't know if you're moving forward or backward or just standing still, get quiet and ask yourself three things:

Is this the grief talking?

Is this the fear talking?

Or is this my true knowing guiding me forward?

These can feel similar from the inside. It's worth slowing down enough to tell them apart.

The grief voice sounds like longing. It's looking back over your shoulder at a soft, rosy version of what was. It's real, and it deserves to be felt. But it's not always meant to be followed. Grief has a way of making the past look more beautiful than it felt in the middle of it.

The fear voice is louder. More urgent. It speaks in worst case scenarios. What if you fail? What if you lose everything? What if you're wrong about yourself? It's trying to protect you. It is not trying to guide you forward.

Then there's your knowing.

Your knowing is quieter than both of them. It doesn't argue. It doesn't catastrophize. It just persists. It's the thing still there when the fear gets tired and the grief gets quiet. It's the thing that lit you up and didn't stop when everything got hard.

That's your heart. That inner place that knew before any of this got complicated.

You're not in a bad place. You're not incapable of figuring this out.

You're just in the messy middle. And the messy middle is not a sign you're doing it wrong. It's a sign you're in the middle of something real.

Take a breath. Come back to yourself. Look back with gratitude. Step forward in trust.

The dance is not failure. And you can do this.

Episode 5 of Heart Notes is live now at pipercabebe.com/listen