Nothing Fits Anymore (Your New Life Will Cost You Your Old One)
The clothes I’m wearing on my body each day don’t fit.
The house I’m living in isn’t mine.
The relationship I long for doesn’t exist yet (do I even know how to have it?).
Sometimes when I speak, I hear an outdated version of myself. “That’s not me anymore”, I think.
But I don’t have the vocabulary of this updated version always at my fingertips. She hasn’t lived as this version of me enough to know what she says differently in every situation. How she responds when she’s hurt. What she’ll do when she doesn’t trust you. How to feel the love and not let it sink her.
She just knows that she does.
She knows who she is, she’s not a stranger to herself, but she isn’t familiar with herself in the way of a comfortable sweater stolen from someone long ago and worn so long she’s forgotten it ever wasn’t hers to begin with.
Maybe it’s instinct. Maybe it’s just life. The understanding that everything is cyclical, that nothing lasts forever, and nothing - nothing - comes for free.
But in order to grow the fruit, something must die to fertilize it.
“Your old life will cost you your new one”, they say.
I sat across the table from my friend today and she asked me “how do you just DO this…stay in the unknown for so long? I think I’d freak out.”
The urge to retreat is right there, around the edges of each change. Because it’s uncomfortable. It’s uncomfortable when none of it fits.
Sometimes, that old sweater is the physical stuff that doesn’t fit - the clothes, the apartment, the reactions. And sometimes it’s just a knowing, an awareness that nothing will ever be the same again.
But as if it could be, I want to shout (or, holler?). Because nothing is fixed, change is constant. And yet, we cling, don’t we? To the comfort of what we had, what we knew, who we identified as, and the people we surrounded ourselves with.
But they don’t tell you how to handle the scary parts, before the excitement sets in. Before the tree has produced fruit. When you’re just caught, suspended. Neither here, nor yet there.
And the frustrating truth is, there isn’t a clean way through it. You don’t handle it like a problem to solve. You feel it. You question yourself. Some days you wake up so sure, and others you wake up wondering what the hell you’re even doing. And then you just decide to keep moving forward.
Not everything disappears all at once.
I still get impatient with too many questions, I still put on a t-shirt and jeans because what else even is “my style” anymore? I still overthink text messages (”am I being too much?”) and I still wonder if the life I’m imagining will ever be mine.
But I no longer shrink to make others more comfortable. And I no longer confuse flexibility with a lack of boundaries. And I no longer hide the fact that I want more, I want it all (I always have, but I couldn’t see it reflected around me).
“Your old life will cost you your new one.”
There’s a space in-between that we don’t see online, because no one wants to share from that space. It doesn’t sell. I get it :) I don’t want to sell you that middle bit, either.
I want to tell you I’ve figured it all out, that I’ve landed.
And increasingly, in so many ways, that does feel true.
But then, I am also living in clothes that don’t fit, in a house that is not mine…
I’m in the space most people fear…the waiting room, the moment where your reality has not entirely rearranged to fit your narrative. When the only sound louder than the insecurity of “nothing to show you to prove that everything is different now” has to be your own self trust.
And that has been the “work”, truly, if I had to synthesize it all. That in this space, on this side of things, I trust myself so deeply. I hold myself so warmly. I know it’s all working out for me, even when I can’t see the proof.
There’s a steadiness to the way I move that didn’t used to be there.
I’m not adrift or uncertain. I’m simply becoming (I know, I know, overused. But still true).
I trust who I am. I trust my ability to manage. I trust that everything that falls apart, as well as comes together, does so for my highest favour. I trust that there’s no “other” that would be better than exactly what has been. I trust that my heart will get me where I’m meant to go.
And the more I move with all this trust, the more the world around me shifts. My body is releasing years of stored responses and stories. If you’ve noticed any kind of “glow”, I attribute that to a lightness around my sense of self that wasn’t present before. And a knowing that sits on top of that lightness, just enough to keep me grounded without pinning me here.
So my new life is costing me my old one. Literally.
The cosy blanket I’ve used for picnics, the vase I thrifted and adore, the paddleboard I spent the summer on. The knowing that I can be on my best friend’s couches in two provinces, two cities, in the SAME day - even if I didn’t do it very often (ok, ever). The knowing mattered. There was safety in that.
Clothes. Countries. Apartments. It’s all changing.
But there are versions of me who only ever dreamed of the possibilities that now seem right over the threshold of my next big step, and they’re looking backwards at my old self with a huge grin of appreciation. If she hadn’t kept moving forward, where would we be now?
“Your old life will cost you your new one.”
But it didn’t cost me myself. It gave me back to me. To my heart. To the only home I ever truly needed to take up residence inside.