Walking Between Timelines
When your nervous system feels the shift before you mind understands it.
Lately, I have been waking up in the middle of the night with panic sitting in my chest. Not the kind tied to one specific event or one clear fear, but something harder to explain. It feels like my body knows something is changing before my conscious mind can fully understand what it is.
There is so much happening in the world around us right now. The constant noise of the news cycle, the speed of technology, the emotional heaviness people are carrying, financial pressure, division, grief, uncertainty. It can feel like the collective energy of humanity is vibrating at a different frequency than it used to. For sensitive people, that can create a feeling of internal instability, like your footing is no longer where it once was.
The best way I can describe it is this: it feels like I am standing between timelines.
Not in a science fiction sense, but in an emotional and spiritual one. There are moments in life where one version of you ends and another begins. When you look back at certain chapters of your life, they almost feel like entirely different realities because the version of you living inside them no longer exists in the same way.
I think about my life before Garvan’s death, and then my life after. Those feel like two completely different timelines. The woman I was before grief entered my world carried herself differently. She viewed life differently. She moved through the world with a different emotional blueprint. When someone you love dies, it is not only their life that changes course. Yours does too. Entire futures disappear overnight, and new ones are quietly formed in their place.
The same thing happened during my years working as a preschool director. That timeline had its own rhythm, identity, responsibilities, stressors, and purpose. I woke up each day inside a completely different energetic reality than the one I live in now. The people around me were different. My routines were different. My emotional focus was different. Even my nervous system operated differently.
And if I am honest, I have jumped timelines many times throughout my life. Motherhood was one. Loss was one. Leadership was one. Healing was one. Community work became another. Every major experience reshaped the architecture of who I was becoming.
I think anxiety sometimes appears when we are standing in the doorway between one version of ourselves and the next.
Part of us is grieving the familiar while another part is being pulled toward something unknown. The nervous system likes certainty. It likes predictability. But growth rarely arrives wrapped in comfort. Transformation usually arrives disguised as confusion, exhaustion, emotional overwhelm, or the feeling that your soul has outgrown its current container. Or it has for me.
That is why panic can feel so strange during seasons of transition. Your mind keeps searching for one clear answer, but the truth is often much bigger than one event. Sometimes your body is responding to accumulated change. Sometimes it is sensing instability in the collective world around you. Sometimes it is reacting to the quiet realization that you can never fully return to who you once were.
And maybe that is what timeline shifts really are.
Not escaping reality, but evolving through it.
Each timeline represents a version of ourselves built around a certain set of experiences, beliefs, relationships, and emotional truths. Then life happens. Grief happens. Love happens. Awakening happens. Survival happens. Healing happens. And suddenly the old version of you no longer fits the life standing in front of you.
The difficult part is that there is often a space in between timelines where nothing feels stable yet. You are no longer fully attached to the old version of yourself, but you have not fully landed in the new one either. That middle space can feel deeply unsettling. It can create anxiety, insomnia, emotional sensitivity, and the feeling that something enormous is shifting beneath the surface.
But I am starting to believe that these moments are not punishments.
They are invitations.
Invitations to become more conscious about how we move through life. Invitations to ground ourselves instead of spiraling. Invitations to reconnect to our bodies, our purpose, our communities, and the things that remind us we are still human in an increasingly disconnected world.
Maybe the answer is not trying to stop the timeline from changing.
Maybe the answer is learning how to walk through the transition without abandoning ourselves in the process.
Because no matter how many timelines I have crossed in this life, the lesson always seems to return to the same thing:
The world will continue to change around us. But the real work is learning how to stay connected to ourselves while it does.
Note to Nathan
There will be seasons in your life where you feel yourself changing faster than the world around you can understand. Do not fear those moments. They usually mean life is expanding you beyond the limits of who you once thought you had to be. Some timelines end quietly. Others end through grief, loss, or transformation. But every version of you has carried wisdom into the next one. Trust that even in uncertainty, you are still becoming.