The Version of You That Can’t Yet Imagine What’s Next

We talk a lot about transformation as if it’s a clean, strategic decision.

Update the résumé. Make the leap. Reinvent yourself.

But career transitions and life pivots rarely feel clear while you’re in them. More often, they feel disorienting, slow, and strangely invisible, especially to the version of you who built a life on certainty.

In Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés suggests that we tend to want transformation only when we know exactly what we’ll look like on the other side. We want guarantees. A preview. A promise that the future self will still feel recognizable.

Recently, while reflecting with peers, I realized something:

The “me” from 2021 (the corporate version of me) would not have chosen this life if she had known exactly how it would unfold.

She couldn’t have imagined it.

She was fast-paced, productive, measured by outcomes and income. Stability mattered. Momentum mattered. Identity was tied to being capable, reliable, and constantly in motion.

The life I live now would have felt foreign to her.

Slower. Quieter. Less predictable. And yes, financially tighter than anything she would have willingly signed up for.

She would have looked at this version of me and thought, Why would you choose that?

And yet, standing here now, I wouldn’t trade this life for anything.