Embracing Transition: Where Breakdown Becomes Breakthrough

Because the in-between is where we grow through what we go through.

““I can’t do this,” are words I have both thought and said often.

It seems that every big transition engulfs us in moments of overwhelm — moments where we are certain we cannot go on.

And yet… we do.

We go through.

And we grow through.

Because transitional spaces are not just uncomfortable — they are the thresholds into resilience.

For many women, childbirth is one of the most primal thresholds they cross — fierce, sacred, and utterly raw — where life begins and identity is forever changed.

There is a particular stage near the end of labor, that is more intense than any other. It has a name that says it all: transition.

It’s the phase between active labor and before pushing and delivery —when the body is no longer simply working… it’s surrendering. A phase so intense, many women feel they cannot go on. But it cannot be skipped. It is the messy middle — the in-between where control is relinquished and something greater moves through.

A passage between what was and what will be.

I remember being there.
Sweating.

Sobbing.

Silent.

Stoic.

Every fiber of my being begged for this part to be over. The pain was beyond what I could have imagined — because truly, you can’t imagine what you have no reference for.

It felt like a tsunami was happening inside me, physically and emotionally. My body had taken over, it was doing what it needed to do to go from one phase to another. My systems were moving instinctively with a force greater than my will.
The woman I had been — the one who carefully organized, planned, controlled — could not carry me forward. She had to dissolve, to let new life come through.

I looked at my midwife and gasped, “I can’t do this.”

She placed her hand on my back and said, steady as an ancient tree,
“You’re in a stage called transition. The only way out is through.

You are resilient.

You think you can’t do this— but you are.

Right now. You’re doing it. You are.”

What I didn’t know then was that I was standing at the threshold of a liminal space.
A space that strips us down.
A space where something deeply powerful stirs.
A space where resilience begins.

A space that is the tender, terrifying middle ground where you are no longer who you were, but not yet who you’re becoming.

These transitional spaces — the uncomfortable in-betweens — are not just hurdles to cross.

They are the passage between breakdown and breakthrough.

They are the places we grow through what we go through.

And although they are uncomfortable, they are the price of admission.

And it’s not only in childbirth.

Life is full of transitions.
When we leave a job that once defined us.
When we walk away from a relationship that no longer nourishes us.
When a dream we buried insists on being unearthed.
When the caregiving ends and we are left in silence.
When an old identity dissolves before the new one has fully arrived.

These transitional moments – confusing, lonely, liminal - are our thresholds of resilience.
They are rough.
They are sacred.
They are the places that feel like our undoing — but become our remaking.

I've felt it in boardrooms, speaking my truth while my voice shook.
I've felt it packing up a home filled with memories I wasn’t ready to let go of.
I've felt it recently, standing alone on the edge of a new life chapter — no map, no title, just a knowing in my bones, it’s time.

And again and again, I’ve heard the quiet whisper:
You think you can’t, but you’re resilient. You’re going through it. And you’re growing through it. You’re doing it. Right now, you are.

That whisper — that resilient truth — became the heartbeat of my work in the world, leading me to become a resilience coach and trainer.

If life was going to keep inviting me into these uncomfortable thresholds asking/demanding that I move through difficult transitional spaces in order to grow forward, I wanted to understand how is it we survive them— and more than that, how we thrive and emerge transformed.

Now it is an honor for me to guide others through their own liminal spaces —
the heartbreaks, the pivots, the identity shifts,
the losses, the silent seasons, the aching transitions —
and remind them that:

Resilience isn’t built once. It’s built again and again. In the messy middles. In the transitional spaces.

We grow through what we go through.
E v e r y time.

That same primal current which carried me through labor —
that carried my mother, and hers, and yours, and all the women before us —
is still moving through us.

It’s in our breath.
In the strong pulse of our hearts when everything else is shaky and uncertain.
In the voice that says, even when we doubt we can do it:
“You can do it. You’re doing it. Right now. You are.”

To every woman carrying the invisible weight of her own becoming and enduring the messy hard transitions no one sees —
I see you.

May we all honor the courage it takes to sit in uncertainty,
to hold ourselves gently in the dark,
to surrender when we cannot plan or push our way through.

May we remember to whisper to ourselves:
“I’ve done hard things before. I’m doing it now.

I will go through this, I will grow through this.

I am resilient.”

Because we are.
And we are not alone.
We are part of a long, unbroken line of women who have walked the in-between — and become more whole on the other side.

This is the invitation of every transition:
To grow through what we go through.
To rise at the threshold with resilience.
To continue, transformed.

When you think you can’t do it, listen for your steady inner wisdom - whispering, or even shouting…

You can do it.

You are doing it.

Right now, you are.

We are.