In-Between Chapters: Finding Hope in the Meaning Vacuum
I’m Hailey, and I’m I help people outgrowing identities built on approval, achievement, and others’ expectations step into a more vital and self-trusting life. You can subscribe to my newsletter and get my articles delivered directly to your inbox here.
I’m having one of those years where every bucket of my life is in flux—and if the comments on my Instagram post this week were any indication, I’m not the only one.
My family’s experiencing seismic shifts.
I’ve been healing from a crushing betrayal since November.
Work is expanding in new directions after a major pivot.
My social circles are shifting and expanding.
Many of the throughlines that have made my life my life—that made me me—have bent, u-turned, or dissipated altogether.
On good days, it’s disorienting. On bad days, it’s a little like being undead: not-quite-here, not-quite-there, living in half-color between two worlds.
Viktor Frankl called moments like this a meaning vacuum or existential vacuum: when your old sources of meaning and identity have stopped working, but the new ones haven’t formed yet. It’s a psychological in-between: a time of lostness and untetheredness. And while it’s uncomfortable, it’s also normal, because the frameworks around which you organized your sense of self have disappeared. Meaning vacuums can be present following significant negative and positive changes, because either way, your old chapter—and old sense of self—has ended.
This isn’t my first meaning vacuum. Almost three years ago, I went through a gnarly one when over-work and striving—two forces I’d built my life around—brought not the fulfillment they’d promised, but crushing burnout and an existential hollowness. Years before that, a romantic partnership ended—and I’d threaded my sense of self so completely into him that in the wake of the breakup, my identity just… collapsed. (Cue my codependency wakeup call!)
Both times, I experienced what I now know are meaning vacuums’ hallmarks: Numbness. Loss of motivation. Chronic emptiness and agitation—like I should’ve been doing something, but I didn’t know what. Trouble making decisions. Difficulty accessing desire, inspiration, or vision. The sense that it was taking too damn long to feel like “myself” again.
Back then, I didn’t have language for what I was going through. I just worried that I was broken—because no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t pull myself out of it as quickly as I wanted.
I didn’t learn till much later that meaning vacuums are incredibly common. The vast majority of us experience one when a core part of our lives changes fundamentally (think: divorce, grief, having kids, major career change, illness, relocation). And in the modern world, the core parts of our lives change more frequently—and more rapidly—than they ever did before.
Bruce Feiler, author of Life is in the Transitions, writes:
“The idea that life follows a series of carefully calibrated progressions—childhood to young adulthood to middle age to old age; dating to marriage to children to empty nest; low-level job to mid-level job to senior-level job to retirement—seems preposterously outdated…The once routine expectation that people will have one job, one relationship, one faith, one home, one body, one sexuality, one identity from adolescence to assisted living is deader than it’s ever been. This is what it means to live a nonlinear life.”
To underscore the point: 50% of marriages end in divorce. 50% of Americans change religions throughout their lives. The average person moves 12 times, and holds 12 different jobs before age 50. (These figures are from Feiler’s 2020 book; I would wager all have increased since then.)
If major life transitions are more common than ever, then meaning vacuums are, too—but we still tend to feel broken and isolated in the midst of them. As if we’re outliers. As if we’re “not getting life right.”
In a way, it’s not surprising that we have no working framework for this liminal space; we’re not taught to. We live in a culture that celebrates certainty, progress, infinite growth, and optimization. We love stories with redemptive arcs—like the celebrity who celebrates 5 years of sobriety, or the widow who finds new love—but we don’t hold the messy chapters in-between with any sort of reverence. We don’t mythologize the times that aren’t Instagrammable, pretty, or clean.
And I guess that’s where I’m going with all of this. This time around, I suspect that my meaning vacuum doesn’t feel quite as destabilizing because I don’t see it as a departure from the “linear path” my life is supposed to follow.
In part, this is because I’ve lived through unexpected life ruptures already—and while I never would have chosen them, I’m grateful for them. Those periods of lostness—some lasting much longer than I expected—led me to new versions of myself that were wiser. Stronger. Stripped of pretense. More discerning.
And in part, it’s due to the privilege of spending my last 8 years working directly with people in transition, and seeing firsthand how unpredictably our lives unfold behind the scenes—no matter our gender, our age, how much success we’ve had, the depth of love we’ve found. My clients have been some of the most capable, strong, intentional, and hardworking people who “did everything right”—and still couldn’t escape the inevitability of life’s changes. The moments when life demanded they begin again.
Seeing meaning vacuums from this perspective—viewing them as normal, natural, and inevitable—shifts my experience fundamentally toward hope. Because if these seasons of collapse and reinvention aren’t detours, but something we return to again and again in the cycle of life, then something bigger becomes clear:
That there’s no such thing as “arriving.” Of reaching a destination where, one day, my life will feel “all figured out.” And while this may, at first, sound depressing, I believe that it brings the fixers, strivers, optimizers, and over-functioners among us great relief. Freedom. Permission.
Personally, I’ve always been someone who solves and schemes: a get it done person. Since I was a kid, I’ve felt immense pressure to build the future I believed was possible: the future where I had “everything together.” The safe, perfect life.
But internalizing the inevitability of transitions gives me permission to stop striving for that life. It gives me permission to stop feeling shitty and self-critical, like I’m doing life “wrong,” because I don’t yet feel like I’ve “arrived.”
Ultimately, it gives me permission to actually be here for my life. Real, actual life. This life.
These days, instead of seeing “my work” as creating a perfect future, I see it as getting better at surfing the inevitable waves of change. It’s a different set of skills entirely—ones we don’t ever think to build when we’re busy optimizing and striving:
Practicing patience.
Living the questions without rushing for answers.
Realizing that, if we never “arrive,” there will never be a “better time” for play, humor, and levity—so learning how to prioritize it now.
Tolerating ambiguity (I’m so excited for my friend Simone Stolzoff’s “How to Not Know”—which teaches this very thing—to come out in May)
Creating and living our own definition of what it means to succeed
Building tolerance, then acceptance, then maaaaybe even gratitude, for the present moment and the life that’s here, in all its mess.
If we’re lucky to live long lives, we’ll outgrow many selves and many chapters. If we can find a way to befriend these changes instead of fear them—to learn their ways, instead of resist them—ironically, we might begin to touch the very peace we’ve been assuming only lives in that distant, impossible future.
Here are 4 ways I’m trying to build a more loving relationship with change this week.
1. I’m simplifying “my purpose” way, WAY down.
This week in the Hustle to Heart bookclub, some our members shared how the messages they’d received since childhood—that they were so smart, that they could make a big difference, that they could do anything with their lives that they wanted—had actually created the opposite effect: a cycle of skyscraper-high self-expectations, overwhelm, and inevitable burnout.
I could relate. I’ve felt that pressure: that I must live, a big, exceptional life. But the more I’m weathered (and hopefully wisened) by living—the more I experience love, loss, illness, wellness, belief, destruction—the more it seems, to me, that managing to be fully engaged in this life as it unfolds is exceptional.
I see my purpose as goal-based: “I want to accomplish X thing,” or “I want to make Y difference.” Instead, I see it as a commitment to a single value. These days, it’s love—love for others, love for my past and present self, love for strangers, animals, and the earth.
I’ve found enormous power in the simplicity of this approach. In moments of conflict, uncertainty, or fear, remembering my value tends to spark clarity about what to do next—or, at minimum, what not to do next.
2. I’m reading Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.
This is easily the most paradigm-shifting book I’ve read in a year, maybe two. The title is deceptive; Four Thousand Weeks has little to do with “time management” in the productivity-centric ways we’re accustomed to. Instead, Burkeman takes an existential tack, exploring how embracing our the limits—our limits as mortals, as beings who will never, ever get to do all the things we want to do—is essentially the key to living meaningfully. I’ve assigned it to my personal bookclub in Seattle and we’re reading it for the next cohort of Hustle to Heart, too. I can’t get enough of this book!
3. I’m embracing “...and this is what it’s like to be alive right now.”
Meditation is how I practice being here for my life, and it’s particularly grounding during seasons of change. Every day, I sit on the cushion for anywhere from 5 to 40 minutes. I close my eyes, follow my breath, and when thoughts or feelings arise, I simply label them—“thinking,” “feeling,”—and return to my breath.
Recently, when I notice a particularly crunchy emotion or a thought—the type I’m inclined to want to fix, or ignore, or “overcome”—I’ve been mentally adding: “...and that’s what it’s like to be alive right now.”
I’ll notice the discomfort of anger: “...and that’s what it’s like to be alive right now.” The stress of anxiety: “...and that’s what it’s like to be alive right now.”
This mantra is my shorthand reminder that peace doesn’t come from creating a difficulty-free future (it doesn’t exist)—it comes from holding the life that’s here compassionately. My goal is to be here for my life as it unfolds—and if this is what it’s like to be alive right now, then by being here for that, I am doing enough.
4. I’m figuring out what my throughlines are.
I’m all for embracing change, but I have no interest in feeling existentially untethered from my purpose, values, meaning, and desires all at once. During this meaning vacuum, connecting with my throughlines—the things about me (desires, passions, traits) that have always been there—anchors me to a sense of self.
Despite the shifts I’m going through in love, work, and family, I’ve always been someone who is curious and wants to learn. I’ve always been someone who swims in deeper waters: feeling deeply, loving deeply. I’ve always been someone who feels at peace near the ocean—who connects with my heart through music and song. I’ve always wanted to hear others’ stories. I’ve always wanted to bring people together.
No matter the shifts to my external world—no matter the relationship I’m in, the job I have, the structure of my social circles—these throughlines hold true.
There’s an exercise for uncovering your throughlines in my free 7-day journaling guide, Permission to Become. (f you have any trouble with the download, just shoot me an email.)
Are you in a meaning vacuum right now? What chapter(s) of life are you outgrowing? Drop your experience in the comments. You’re not alone—and if you don’t believe me, just check out the hundreds of comments on this week’s post.
I would love to support you as you navigate the journey from who you’ve been to who you’re coming. For more support, check out:
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