For me, the ground first shifted unexpectedly after the birth of my first child. Not because of my child (although we’ll get to that — aka the second shift), but because of the chronic pain that suddenly developed, and the diagnosis I subsequently received, rewrote how I moved through the world almost overnight.
I hadn’t seen it coming. Nobody had. One day, life looked a certain way. The next, it didn’t. What I wasn’t prepared for was the disorientation that arrived without warning (and certainly without invitation) on an otherwise unremarkable day.
For you, it might not be physical illness. It might be something else entirely. But if life has recently pulled the rug out from under you, and you’re standing there wondering how you’re supposed to find your footing again, this one’s for you.
1. Allow yourself to feel completely blindsided (without shame).
The thing nobody tells you about unexpected change is that the shock itself is almost its own separate trauma. It’s not just the thing that happened. It’s the fact that you didn’t see it coming. At all. You had no time to brace, no chance to mentally rehearse, no opportunity to prepare yourself. It just arrived. And that’s a specific kind of brutal.
When I first developed chronic pain, I lived with some hope that finding out the cause might mean it could be cured. But then the cause turned out to be hEDS (that’s hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome), a genetic connective tissue disorder which has no cure. Finding out there was a name for what I’d been experiencing should have felt like relief. And eventually it did. But first, it felt like the floor had dropped out entirely.
And that’s ok. In fact, it’s perfectly normal.
There’s enormous cultural pressure to respond to difficulty with immediate composure. To be strong. To find the positive. To not fall apart in the biscuit aisle of a supermarket, ideally.
Resist that pressure — at least for now.
The reality of what’s happened needs to land somewhere, and that somewhere is you. You are allowed to be shocked. You are allowed to not be okay. The composed, coping version of you will come back. Just not yet.
2. Stop trying to make sense of it for the time being.
Our brains are pattern-seeking machines. Randomness feels epically unsafe. So unsafe, in fact, that we’d almost rather believe we caused something than accept that life can simply pull the rug out without warning or reason. And so we replay. We retrace. We lie awake at 3am mentally revisiting every decision of the last five years, looking for the exact moment where it all went wrong, as if finding it would somehow change anything. Sound familiar?
The problem is that some things don’t have a satisfying explanation. Sometimes the diagnosis arrives. Sometimes the relationship ends. Sometimes, as I discovered in my second ground shift, the child you bring home is unexpectedly different from anything you’d imagined. Not less, just different. And no amount of replaying will tell you why, or what you could have done differently. Because the answer, often, is nothing. Nothing at all.
The search for “why” is not always answerable. And camping out there too long keeps you stuck at the scene, turning over the same stones, finding the same absence of answers. Give yourself permission to not know. Set a timer on the spiral if you have to — and when it goes off, redirect your thoughts and your energy.
The “why” may never arrive. And what you do next doesn’t have to wait for it.
3. Grieve the life you thought you were going to have.
When unexpected change arrives, the loss isn’t always a person. Sometimes it’s a future. A version of yourself. An assumption about how your life was going to go that was so embedded you didn’t even realize you were holding it until it was gone.
The job you thought was secure. The relationship you thought was solid. The body you thought you could rely on.
For me, when chronic pain collided with motherhood, I grieved the version of motherhood I had imagined. The spontaneous, physical, tireless version. The one who didn’t have to calculate the cost of every activity in units of pain the following day. Nobody really prepares you for the loss of a vision, because from the outside, everything looks fine. What exactly is there to grieve?
Plenty, as it turns out. And it deserves to be taken seriously. You cannot build something new while standing in the ruins of the old thing, pretending they’re not ruins.
4. Resist the urge to make big decisions immediately.
When the ground shifts, the instinct is to grab the wheel. Hard. To do something, anything, to feel a sense of agency again in a situation that has made you feel completely powerless. But. You need to try not to act on it.
Decisions made in the eye of the storm are rarely the ones you’d make with a clearer head. Quitting the job, ending another relationship, moving cities, booking a one-way flight to Lisbon, and reinventing yourself as someone who does yoga at sunrise and owns fewer than thirty possessions… These can all feel like decisive, empowering moves when you’re in acute distress. (And no judgment if Lisbon is genuinely calling you, but maybe sit with it for a week first.)
Of course, sometimes these moves are the right call. But more often, they’re an attempt to outrun feelings that will simply follow you to the new city, the new job, the new situation — slightly jetlagged, but otherwise intact.
There’s a real difference between decisions that genuinely need to be made urgently and decisions that only feel urgent because of the emotional intensity you’re currently operating under. Give yourself a window. Say thirty to sixty days, before doing anything you can’t easily reverse. Your future self will thank you for it.
5. Find the one thing you can control and put your focus there.
When life delivers a change you didn’t choose, the loss of control can be paralyzing. Everything feels precarious. Everything feels like it could shift again at any moment — because, as you now know firsthand, it can. And the temptation to try to control everything at once is completely understandable. It also tends to result in controlling nothing, while exhausting yourself comprehensively in the process.
So instead of everything, find one thing.
One small, concrete, genuinely controllable thing. Your morning routine. A walk you take at the same time each day. The fact that you cook yourself a proper meal rather than eating cereal over the sink at 10pm.
Doing one thing intentionally — choosing it, doing it, completing it — sends a small but surprisingly powerful message to the part of you that feels helpless: you are not entirely at the mercy of this.
6. Let people in.
There are two ways people tend to fail at this, and they look completely different from the outside. The first is retreating entirely. The “I don’t want to be a burden,” the “I don’t even know where to begin explaining this,” the sending of “I’m fine, just a bit busy at the moment!” to four different people in a single afternoon when you are very much not fine, and then sitting alone, wondering why you feel so isolated.
The second is performing. The “I’m okay, actually, I think this might even be for the best” routine, delivered so convincingly that you start to believe it yourself. And in doing so, closing off the emotional processing you actually need to do.
Both are avoidance. Both make complete sense. But neither helps.
Of course, not everyone deserves access to your rawest moments, and you absolutely don’t have to distribute your vulnerability indiscriminately. Find your one or two people — the ones who can sit with you in the mess without immediately trying to tidy it up. The listeners, not the fixers. The ones who don’t need you to be okay yet.
If you don’t have those people, try to find your tribe. Support groups, particularly those for the unique situation you’ve found yourself in, can be helpful here and are often available in person, virtually, and online. Just be careful about what you’re sharing until you’ve established that someone is who they say they are, particularly online.
And if professional support is something you have access to, don’t dismiss it. There is nothing weak about deciding that what you’re carrying deserves more than you can manage entirely alone.
7. Be careful who you listen to.
People will say things. They will say them with love, with the very best of intentions, and some of them will land like a small, well-meaning punch to the stomach.
The landscape of unhelpful responders is rich and varied, and you’ll encounter most of them during a crisis (I certainly have). There’s the panicker, who responds to your situation with such visible alarm that you end up spending twenty minutes reassuring them.
There’s the silver-lining merchant, who cannot tolerate sitting with difficulty for even a moment and rushes you cheerfully toward the bright side before you’ve had a chance to acknowledge the dark.
There’s the minimizer, who likes to dismiss your valid pain and suffering by telling you how other people have it worse than you (often providing extensive detail on why you’re so much luckier than they are).
There’s the person who somehow makes your crisis a platform for a lengthy story about themselves. And finally, there’s the one who arrives with a detailed twelve-step plan (usually of things you’ve already tried) when all you really needed was for someone to say: “That sounds really hard. I’m so sorry.”
These people probably love you. But love doesn’t automatically make someone the right person to listen to right now. For now, prioritize the ones who can tolerate uncertainty alongside you.
8. Redefine what “okay” looks like right now.
If you’re someone who is used to functioning well, someone who keeps plates spinning, shows up reliably, and broadly speaking has things together, then unexpected change has a particular sting. Because suddenly, the standards you’ve always held yourself to feel impossible, and the gap between who you were and who you’re currently managing to be can feel enormous. It can feel like failure. Like something has gone wrong with you, specifically, on top of everything else.
We all have an internal picture of what “doing well” looks like, and right now, you may need to set that picture aside. Not forever. Just for now. An athlete recovering from a serious injury doesn’t train the same way they did before. They recalibrate, they work with where they actually are rather than where they were, and nobody calls that giving up. Nobody says, “Well, they’re clearly not trying.”
You’re no different.
Be as fair about your current capacity as you would be about anyone else’s. You would not expect someone else to perform at full strength in the middle of a crisis. Extend yourself the same basic courtesy. You’d be surprised how much lighter things feel when you stop fighting on two fronts at once.
9. Look for the unexpected unlocking.
I’m not going to tell you this happened for a reason. I don’t know that. Neither do you. But here’s what I will say: unexpected disruption sometimes unlocks alternative paths for us. Not because it was meant to. Not because some cosmic force decided it was time. But because we are more adaptable than we give ourselves credit for, and when forced to find a different path, we sometimes discover one we never would have looked for otherwise.
I could not have anticipated that learning to live with chronic pain would teach me things about patience, about prioritizing, about what actually matters, that nothing else had managed to. I didn’t choose that lesson. I resented it for a long time, if I’m honest. But it unlocked something. In its own time.
And finding out that one of my children has multiple additional care and health needs— something nobody hands you a manual for at the antenatal class — turned out to open up an entire world I didn’t know existed. A different world from the one I’d imagined, for sure. But not a lesser one. Actually, a much richer one.
You don’t have to find a silver lining right now. But consider leaving a small crack in the door — just enough light to let in the possibility that this is not only an ending.
10. Build the new normal, one small thing at a time.
We’ve reached the point where we need to talk about the rebuild. Because presumably that’s why you’re here.
First things first, I’m sorry to tell you it’s unlikely to be dramatic. Real recovery from unexpected change is usually subtle and incremental, and that’s okay. The pressure to bounce back bigger and better is unrealistic for most people, and you’re allowed to ignore it entirely.
The question that actually helps isn’t “What does my new life look like?” because you probably can’t answer that yet, and it only creates unnecessary pressure. The question that actually helps is: “What is one thing I can do today that points in the right direction?”
That’s it. That’s the whole framework. Not a five-year plan. Not a vision board (though go for it if that’s your thing).
Maybe it’s signing up for something new. Maybe it’s making one phone call you’ve been putting off for three weeks. Maybe it’s simply getting outside for twenty minutes and remembering that the world is, despite considerable evidence to the contrary, still out there.
The size of the thing is not the point. The direction is the point. One small act of forward motion becomes the first brick. Then another. Then another. And one day — not today, maybe not for a while — you look up and realize you’ve been building something. It doesn’t look like the old thing. But it’s yours, and you made it.
Final thoughts…
Unexpected change is disorienting in a way that’s genuinely hard to explain to someone who hasn’t been through it. One moment, the path is clear. The next, you’re somewhere you never planned to be, trying to get your bearings in the dark.
But here’s what I know, having had the ground shift more than once: you find them. Maybe not quickly, maybe not gracefully, but you find your footing eventually.
What’s more, people who’ve had the ground shift beneath them often turn out to be among the most grounded, resilient people you’ll ever meet. Because we learn the hard way that we were never as fragile as we feared.
