There are periods in life when the things that used to carry you stop working. It rarely happens all at once. The striving stops satisfying you. A relationship that felt solid starts to crack. A role you've inhabited for years begins to feel strangely hollow, and you're tired in a way that sleep doesn't touch.
Often these periods arrive at a threshold: a significant birthday, a bereavement, a divorce, children leaving home, a redundancy, a diagnosis. Sometimes there's no obvious event at all, and you wake up one morning knowing you can't carry on as you have been.
Most of us respond by trying to push through. We tell ourselves to be grateful, to stop overthinking, to get back to normal. But the feeling persists, and it's easy to conclude that something has gone wrong with us.
The old alchemists saw it differently. They believed that transformation begins with breaking down rather than clarity, and they had a name for that stage: mortificatio. It wasn't about physical death. It described the sense that something old is ending, whether an identity, a certainty or a way of relating to the world. Myths and fairy tales say the same thing in their own language. The hero loses the path in the forest, the wanderer goes down into the underworld, the king is stripped of his crown. Before anything new can emerge, something familiar has to be given up.
When this happens in ordinary life we rarely recognise it as part of a bigger process. We call it a crisis, or failure, and wonder why we can't just go back to who we were before.
But perhaps who you were before is exactly what life is asking you to outgrow. That version of you wasn't wrong. It has taken you as far as it can.
These times are frightening because they offer no map or timetable. You're letting go of a self before you know what will replace it. Many people later look back on them as turning points, though not because they enjoyed them, and not because suffering is automatically meaningful. They were pushed into a conversation they'd been avoiding for years, about what they want, what matters, and who they are underneath the roles they learned to play.
If you're in a period like this, you may not need to rush through it. You might instead get curious about what is trying to emerge.
