Signs You’re In a Season of ‘In-Between’ (and How to Embrace It)

Recognizing the Physical and Emotional Signs of Transition

Your nervous system registers transitions before your conscious mind fully processes them. You might find yourself inexplicably tired despite adequate sleep, or experiencing a low-level anxiety that has no obvious source. This isn't burnout or depression—it's your system processing a fundamental shift.

Common physical markers include disrupted sleep cycles, changes in appetite, or feeling simultaneously wired and exhausted. Your body is essentially running background processing on major life recalibration, which requires significant energy.

Emotionally, you might notice yourself crying more easily, feeling unusually nostalgic, or experiencing waves of grief for no apparent reason. You're mourning the version of yourself that's dissolving, even if you didn't particularly like that version. Loss is loss, regardless of whether what you're losing was serving you.

The Disorientation That Signals Deep Change

That feeling of being slightly dissociated from your own life? That's not a problem to fix—it's information. When fundamental aspects of your identity are shifting, your usual ways of orienting yourself in the world temporarily stop working.

You might find yourself forgetting what you used to enjoy, questioning decisions that previously felt obvious, or feeling strangely detached from goals that once motivated you. This cognitive fog is your psyche's way of creating space for something new to emerge.

When Your Sense of Self Feels Fuzzy

The clearest sign you're in an in-between season is when you can't quite articulate who you are anymore. Not because you lack self-awareness, but because the answer is genuinely in flux. Your core values might remain stable while your expression of them transforms completely.

You might notice your wardrobe suddenly feels wrong, not because fashion changed but because the person who assembled it no longer exists in quite the same form. This explains the urge many people feel to dramatically change their hair, reorganize their entire home, or purge their closet during transitional periods—external order becomes a proxy for internal reorganization.

Career paths that once excited you might now feel like someone else's dream. Relationships that fit perfectly suddenly require renegotiation. Hobbies that used to provide joy now feel like obligations. These aren't signs of depression or fickleness—they're evidence of authentic evolution.

The Death of Old Stories

Perhaps most unsettling is the dissolution of the stories you've told yourself about who you are. "I'm the person who always..." doesn't hold the same weight. "I would never..." starts to feel less absolute. These narrative cracks create space for more complex, truthful self-understanding.

This process connects deeply to learning to take up space authentically as you shed outdated versions of yourself and allow room for who you're becoming.

The Social Symptoms Nobody Talks About

In-between seasons frequently bring unexpected social shifts. Friends you felt close to might suddenly feel like strangers, not because anything went wrong, but because you're changing at different rates or in different directions. This can trigger guilt and grief simultaneously.

You might find yourself withdrawing from social situations that previously energized you, not from depression but from a genuine need to protect emerging aspects of yourself. Groups that once felt like home can suddenly feel performative or draining.

Conversely, you might feel unexpectedly drawn to people or communities that would have seemed foreign to you before. These new connections often reflect parts of yourself that are just beginning to surface.

The Loneliness of Becoming

One of the most challenging aspects of in-between seasons is the specific loneliness that comes with not yet having language for what you're becoming. You're too changed to fully relate to your old world but not yet established enough in your new orientation to find your people there.

This temporary isolation, while uncomfortable, serves an important purpose. It creates the psychological space necessary for genuine transformation rather than simply adapting yourself to fit existing social structures.

How to Actually Embrace the In-Between

Embracing an in-between season doesn't mean pretending to enjoy the discomfort. It means recognizing that this particular kind of discomfort is productive rather than pathological. The goal isn't to make peace with uncertainty in general—it's to acknowledge that this specific uncertainty is your psyche's way of preventing premature closure.

Start by naming what's actually happening: "I'm in a season of transition." This simple acknowledgment reduces the secondary suffering that comes from thinking something is wrong with you. The transition is the thing happening; your confusion and discomfort are appropriate responses, not problems requiring solutions.

Resist the urge to force clarity or make major irreversible decisions from this space. In-between seasons call for small experiments rather than grand commitments. Try things on without immediately needing to know if they're your new forever identity.

Working With Rather Than Against the Process

Your system knows how to do this. Humans have been navigating transitions since we existed. What interrupts the natural process isn't the difficulty of change itself but the constant interference from trying to control or accelerate it.

Allow things to feel messy. Keep a low bar for productivity and a high bar for self-compassion. This season isn't asking for achievement—it's asking for attention and patience.

The principles behind setting micro-boundaries become especially important during transitions, helping you protect the delicate process of becoming without completely isolating yourself.

Creating Anchors When Everything Feels Unstable

While you can't force clarity about your emerging self, you can create external structures that support the internal process. These anchors aren't about controlling the outcome—they're about maintaining enough stability that you can tolerate the transformation.

Maintain basic routines even when they feel arbitrary. The morning coffee ritual, the evening walk, the Sunday meal prep—these mundane consistencies provide your nervous system with evidence that not everything is in flux simultaneously.

Keep physical space organized even when internal space feels chaotic. This isn't about toxic positivity or suppressing the mess—it's about reducing the cognitive load of decision fatigue when your mental energy is already taxed by processing fundamental change.

The Role of Creative Expression

In-between seasons often call for non-verbal processing. Journaling might feel too direct or premature, but movement, art, music, or other embodied practices allow transformation to unfold without forcing it into language before it's ready.

Notice what wants to move through you without immediately needing to understand or interpret it. Sometimes you need to paint before you know what you're feeling. Sometimes you need to reorganize your entire closet before you understand what's shifting.

What Growth Actually Looks Like in Liminal Spaces

We're conditioned to think of growth as linear progression toward a clear goal. But in-between seasons, growth looks more like deepening—an expansion of your capacity to hold complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty without collapsing into either premature answers or permanent confusion.

You're learning to trust your intuition at a more fundamental level, to distinguish between healthy discomfort that precedes breakthrough and unhealthy discomfort that signals misalignment. This discernment doesn't come from thinking your way through it—it emerges from repeatedly showing up to the uncertainty and noticing what happens.

The insights that emerge from in-between seasons tend to be quieter than epiphanies. You might not have a dramatic moment of clarity but rather a gradual recognition that you've been thinking or feeling differently for a while now. The change accumulated so slowly you didn't notice until suddenly the old skin didn't fit anymore.

Trusting the Timeline You Can't Control

Perhaps the hardest part of in-between seasons is that you can't rush them. There's no life hack for accelerating genuine transformation. You can create conditions that support the process, but you can't force the timeline.

What you can do is stop adding suffering by believing you should be somewhere other than exactly where you are. The in-between season will end when it ends, and trying to force it to resolve faster typically just extends the duration or results in choosing a new identity that's no more authentic than the old one.

Eventually—and it always happens eventually—you'll notice small moments of clarity. A decision that feels obvious. A direction that calls to you without needing to understand why. These aren't decisions you make so much as recognitions of what's already becoming true.

Trust that this foggy, uncomfortable, confusing season is doing exactly what it's supposed to do. You're not lost. You're just between stories, and the next one is writing itself whether you can read it yet or not.