Resurface summary

Life rarely offers us clean beginnings or tidy endings. When we enter a transition point in our life, it can happen quietly – in a way that we don’t even realize it until we’re deep in it – or it can happen suddenly and with a powerful force.

Generally speaking there are four different types of transitions. There are the ones we see coming, like graduating or retiring; the ones that blindside us, like a sudden injury or a windfall; the nonevents, like the dreams we quietly realize will never come to pass; and the sleepers, the slow shifts we don’t recognize until we look back and see how much we’ve changed.

For author Cassidy Krug, she saw a major transition coming – in fact, she was staring it right in the face. Standing at the edge of the diving board at the London Olympics, she knew that her upcoming dive would mark the final moment of her competitive career. Yet, despite this awareness, the transition still proved just as difficult to navigate.

She’d spent years training and devoting herself to one thing: diving. It was a large part of her identity. What was her new identity going to be? There was a real challenge in figuring that out.

As for Ryan, a celebrated distance runner, his change fell into the “sleeper” category. His body, worn by years of punishing miles, slowly and gradually began to falter until one day he finally had to accept that he could no longer compete with the best.

Then there’s Karie, who experienced the nonevent transition of realizing she couldn’t have kids of her own. It came after spending years of unsuccessful IVF treatments. But coming to terms with this change in plans created space for a new future she hadn’t imagined: owning a salon, mentoring stylists, and pouring her nurturing spirit into a new kind of family. To mark the end of her fertility journey, she threw herself a “hysterectomy shower,” transforming a moment of pain into a celebration, claiming the narrative of her own life with courage and humor.

And what about Nora? Her cancer diagnosis was one of those sudden moments that hit hard. Being a social worker, she thought she could conquer it just like any other problem she’d faced. It took some time before she realized that her old life was gone forever. Post-treatment, she was exhausted, her body permanently changed. Nora’s transition, like a lot of transitions, wasn’t neat. It was ongoing.

However they arrive, all transitions create a void – a messy and uncomfortable space between what was and what will be. But these are important spaces to engage with. This is where we find meaning in our endings so we can move forward with renewed purpose. In the sections that follow, we’ll look at how that process unfolds in everyday life.