After weeks of being immersed in the unending bitter white cold of winter, Spring arrives.
The pond ice melts, the ground tenderizes, and tiny specks of green pop up high and low, sprinkled like confetti. Temperatures rise, it rains instead of snows, and even though there might be an abrupt drop here or there, slowly and steadily the turtles return to lie on the sunny rocks, the birds come back singing and building nests, and my nasal passages start dripping. Spring has sprung.
Gradually, then suddenly.
I went to the dentist this week to get a cracked filling repaired. I hate going to the dentist, and one of the less-celebrated gifts of perimenopause is that my teeth have had their own strong opinion about my changing hormones. Six fillings in the last year was plenty, without having to go back for a re-do.
Sitting in the chair, kneading a squishy stress ball in both hands, my hygienist looked up and said, “You don’t seem as anxious as you were in October.”
I smiled, released my grip on the squishy, and recognized that she was right.
I hadn’t noticed a dramatic shift — you rarely do from the inside — but since she named it, I could feel the truth of it settling. I’ve been committed to resourcing and self-care, including EMDR work I wrote about here, and I’ve been on a steady dose of the right hormones for me. Something has quietly changed. I am less anxious than I was.
We tend to think that change should feel like teleportation — one version of ourselves blinking out, a new one arriving in its place. But that is almost never how it works.
Changing identities unfolds gradually, then suddenly.
I was first introduced to this idea during the pandemic, when I had the pleasure of interviewing Susan Scott for a women’s community event. In her book Fierce Conversations, she writes that we succeed or fail one conversation at a time — gradually, then suddenly. And further: “The conversation is the relationship.” Which means we build and erode our closest bonds not in the big moments, but in the accumulation of small ones, until one day we look up and realize something has irrevocably shifted.
That landed in my body as true the moment I heard it.
The phrase itself traces back further, to Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. In a quiet, alcohol-soaked exchange, a man is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” he says. “Gradually, then suddenly.” We become and un-become different versions of ourselves the same way — in relationships, in identities, in the long slow work of healing.
This week in our Conscious Leadership Accelerator, two veteran participants shared something that stopped me. After years of showing up to resource themselves and practice new ways of being, they noticed they were suddenly different. Situations that used to hijack them feel quieter now. People who used to be triggering just... aren’t, in the same way.
They almost missed it. Because when we’re inside a transition, we mostly notice what hasn’t changed yet. We notice the gap between where we are and where we wish we were. We long to be further along the path than we are, and in that longing, we walk right past the progress we’ve actually made.
But here’s what I keep coming back to.
The ground doesn’t announce that it’s thawing. The bird doesn’t send a memo that she’s on her way back. The green doesn’t ask permission before it appears. The whole magnificent shift from winter to spring happens in a thousand small, unremarkable moments — and then one morning you walk outside and something is simply, undeniably different.
You are no different.
The resourcing you’ve been doing, the hard conversations you’ve finally had, the moments you paused before reacting, the slow and steady work of becoming more yourself — all of it is accumulating beneath the surface into something you can’t quite see yet. You may not feel like you’ve arrived. You may still be longing to be further along. But if someone who knows you looked up right now and really paid attention, I suspect they might say what my hygienist said to me.
You seem different than you did.
Trust the gradual. Spring always comes, even in Ohio, even in perimenopause, even in the long seasons that make you wonder if anything is changing at all.
It is.
Gradually, then suddenly.