Reinvention isn't hard because you don't know what to do
- May 1
- 4 min read
You know. You've always bloody known.
It's hard because every time you get close to the edge of actually doing it — actually changing the thing, leaving the thing, saying the thing out loud — you find a very convincing reason not to. And you dress it up so nicely. The timing. The kids. The money. What people will think. What you might lose. What you're not ready for yet.
Bollocks.
I know this because I did it too. For years. Smiling away, getting on with it, being perfectly fine, thank you very much — while Nick, my husband and genuinely the most patient man alive, watched me slowly disappear into a version of myself I didn't recognise and said, very quietly, one night over dinner: "I think you've forgotten who you are."
He wasn't wrong. He was bloody annoying about being right, but he wasn't wrong.
And Grace — my stepdaughter, 19, a model, effortlessly, infuriatingly herself — would look at me sometimes with this expression. You know the one. The one that says everything the person is too kind to actually say out loud. The what the hell are you waiting for look. From a teenager. Aimed at me. A grown woman. Mortifying.
What the hell was I waiting for?
Here's the truth. The actual one. The one that will piss you off a bit before it sets you free.
You are not waiting for the right moment.
You are not stuck.
You are not held back by the timing or the circumstances or any of the very reasonable, very convincing stories you've been telling yourself for the last however many years.
You are choosing comfort over truth. Every single day. Quietly, reliably, consistently choosing the familiar sofa over the terrifying door.
And comfort is a sneaky little bastard because it doesn't feel like a choice. It feels like being sensible. Responsible. Realistic. It sounds like your own voice, your own logic, your own very reasonable explanation for why now is not the time and later is better and you'll do it when things settle down a bit.
It's a lie. A very comfortable, very familiar, very convincing lie.
Because reinvention doesn't require a plan. It doesn't require certainty. It doesn't require everyone around you to understand it or support it or queue up to give you a round of bloody applause for finally deciding to live like you actually mean it.
It just requires you to stop pretending.
That's it. That's the whole thing.
You are not stuck.
Stuck implies something outside of you is holding you in place. A wall. A lock. A circumstance genuinely beyond your control. But there's no wall. There's just the very comfortable sofa of your own familiar life and the fact that you keep sitting back down on it every single time you stand up.
You're not stuck.
You're staying.
And staying is a choice. An active, daily, deliberate choice dressed up as helplessness.
I'm not saying that to be cruel. I'm saying it because I made that choice for years. Staying in the safe version. The performing-fine version. The I'll-do-it-when-the-time-is-right version. Meanwhile Nick was patiently handing me cups of tea. Meanwhile Grace was out there living her actual life out loud and making it look effortless in that deeply irritating way 19-year-olds do. Meanwhile I was googling menopause symptoms at midnight and crying in the car on a Tuesday afternoon and genuinely wondering why my own life felt like it belonged to someone else entirely.
The answer — the one I really didn't want — was that I'd let it.
Nobody took it from me. I handed it over. Piece by careful, polite, well-meaning piece. To everyone else's comfort. Everyone else's expectations. Everyone else's version of who I was supposed to be by now.
Reinvention isn't a revelation. It isn't a moment. It isn't a dramatic scene where everything becomes clear and you walk out of your old life into the sunlight with your hair blowing in the wind and a brand new sense of purpose.
It's a Tuesday evening. It's one sentence you stop swallowing. It's saying to the person sitting opposite you — for me that was Nick, on a completely unremarkable Wednesday, with cold pasta — "I think I need something to change." And meaning it. And not immediately explaining it away or softening it or apologising for saying it.
It starts there. Not with a plan. Not with certainty. With one honest sentence and the decision not to take it back.
So here's what I need you to ask yourself — and I need you to not answer it quickly, not be sensible about it, not immediately think of three reasons why it's complicated:
If the comfortable version of your life was simply gone tomorrow and you had to choose what came next — what would you actually choose?
Sit with that.
That answer. The one that came up before the sensible voice cut in. That's where you're going.
Stop calling it being stuck.
You're not stuck.
You're just not quite ready yet to admit that you're staying.
And when you're ready to stop staying — when you're done with the comfortable sofa and the sensible reasons and the performing fine — the Reckoning Room is waiting.
Six women. Six weeks. One honest room. Be patient.... its coming.
No performing. No pretending. No suffering politely.
Women who refuse to suffer politely live here.
Love from Missy Moo x
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