Embracing Change: Who Am I Now?

This episode is also available in VIDEO format on YouTube.

In this episode of the Pickleball and Partnership Podcast, Charlotte reflects on recent conversations about grief and a life change that included losing her mum, discovering she was pregnant two days later, starting a new job five days later, and welcoming her younger brother into her home. 

Charlotte explores a listener theme — “I don’t even recognise the person I used to be” — and discusses what happens after healing and transition, when identity shifts bring loneliness and discomfort. She explains that meaningful transformation involves grieving old identities (people-pleasing, staying quiet, overworking, never asking for help) because familiar patterns feel safe to the nervous system even when unhealthy. 

Using pickleball skill development as a metaphor, she notes that feeling frustrated and confused before expansion is evidence of rewiring, not failure. She invites listeners to ask who they are beneath roles and who they are becoming.

00:00 Welcome Back and Recap

01:36 Who Am I Now

02:27 Grieving Old Identities

06:17 Safety and the Nervous System

08:19 Pickleball Growth Analogy

10:45 When Growth Feels Like Grief

13:27 Inner Child and Survival Roles

15:04 Questions for Your Becoming

17:18 Invitation and Closing

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Music: Purple Planet Music
Thanks to Purple Planet Music for Pickleball & Partnership Intro and Outro music Purple Planet Music is a collection of music written and performed by Chris Martyn and Geoff Harvey. 

Transcript

Speaker 0:00

Hello, my friends, and welcome back to the Pickleball and Partnership Podcast. Over the past few weeks, we have been on quite the journey together. We talked about having a conversation with my mum, which was so beautiful. Almost 30 years since she left this earth. Oh my gosh, I just, I so enjoyed that episode. And then we explored grief and what no one tells us about navigating loss. And last week, I shared the story of how my life changed almost overnight. I lost my mum I discovered I was pregnant two days later. I started a new job five days later, and welcomed my younger brother into our home after my mum had died. And after that episode, so many of you reached out and said something that really stayed with me. You said, "I don't even recognize the person I used to be." And I think that might be one of the loneliest places to find yourself. I know for me, I really found that incredibly lonely. Not because you've done anything wrong, but because you've changed, and I really felt this because I had changed. After I became a motherless mother, I was a different person. And so today, I really want to talk about something that we don't often acknowledge, and that is what happens after we grow. What happens after growth? After the healing, after the grief, after the life transition, when one day you wake up and quietly think, "Oh, okay, who am I now?" So when we think about grief, we often, we think about losing people. We think about not having those that we are so close to, those that we love, those whose lives we are so intertwined with. We think about them not being around anymore, grief. But what if I told you this, that every meaningful transformation asks us to grieve? So it's not only the people that are no longer here with us, but it's also our identities. It's also the version of you who needed everyone's approval, the version of you who stayed quiet and didn't speak up for herself, the version of you who worked yourself into exhaustion, the version of you who believed that you weren't enough Or the version of you that never asked for help and did it all yourself. I'll put my hand up to that one for sure. Or what about the version who thought she had to earn love? Those identities don't disappear overnight. Yes, they slowly loosen their grip, and then letting them go can feel actually surprisingly painful because even unhealthy identities feel safe when we've lived inside them for decades. It's that nervous system regulation where what feels familiar feels safe, even if it's unhealthy, even if it means we don't speak up for ourselves, even if it means that we stay quiet, and we put everybody else's needs before our own. And sometimes I wonder, what would my life look like if I had stayed asleep? What if I had never questioned my beliefs? What if I had stayed in nursing until I retired? What if I never became curious about why I reacted the way I did, what my triggers are, why I was responding in the way that I was responding, what certain situations triggered me, or why I found it so hard to receive, why I always wanted to rescue people? And when I sat with this and I thought about it, I thought, "Well, you know, life would probably have looked quite comfortable." It would certainly have looked and been very predictable and respectable, but I don't think it would have felt alive. In fact, looking back now to just before I woke up, I didn't feel alive. I loved my job, I loved what I did, I loved my family, I loved the connections, I loved sport, and going to the gym, and swimming, and pickleball, and getting together with friends, but I didn't feel alive, truly alive and connected to myself like I do now. Because somewhere underneath there was this version of me, the real me, the authentic me, the Self with a capital S, that was waiting to emerge. Not, not a different Charlotte, a more authentic Charlotte, the real Charlotte. And becoming her meant that I needed to let go of the old one. I needed to let go of the identity I was clinging so desperately onto People often say, "I know what I need to do, so why can't I do it?" Is that you? Have you ever said, "I know what I need to do, so why can't I do it?" And the answer typically is not willpower, because we all have willpower to do things. The answer is usually safety. Our nervous systems are designed to keep us alive, not to help us become our highest selves possible. To literally keep us alive every single moment. Am I safe? Am I safe? Am I safe? Constantly checking, constantly looking around. And so when you do start to show up differently, when you do start to speak your truth and set boundaries, maybe you start a business. Maybe you, like me, you leave a career that you have become so familiar with. Maybe it's about becoming more visible or receiving love, receiving more love. In those moments, your nervous system often whispers, "Uh-oh, alert. This feels dangerous." And then it may get louder and louder until it's shouting at you, "Alert. Alert. Abort. This is not safe. This is dangerous. This is life and death." Because it's so unfamiliar. That old identity has been so limiting But it was so predictable, and predictability feels safe. I see this, of course, on the pickleball court all the time. I see it in my play, I see it in my partner's play, I see it in my opponent's play. When you first decide to improve your game, and this definitely is the case for me, when I decide to work on a new skill, tweak something, maybe it's my serve, maybe it's my return, maybe it's my third shot drop or drive, I got worse. I got worse before I got better, right? Can you relate to that?. your play deteriorates before you start to improve. So maybe you've been told to change your grip or move your feet differently, stand in a different position, try doing a split step before you take the next shot. You stop doing the habits that you have repeated thousands of times, and for a while, everything feels so awkward, right? It- it's like you're thinking instead of flowing. Your brain almost gets in the way of your ability to now take the shot. And so you miss shots that normally would, would be so easy for you. i started wondering, like, "Maybe I should go back to the old way." But here's the beautiful truth. That awkward stage is evidence that your brain is rewiring, and this is so important. So let me say that again. When we are in that awkward stage of that deterioration, that, "Oh, my gosh, all of a sudden, I now cannot play. I cannot do that as well as I used to," that is your brain rewiring new circuits, new neuropathways. This is not you failing. This is not you failing. This is you learning, like when we all first learnt to walk, and we fell down, and we got up, and we fell down, and we couldn't do it, until one day we walked, and we never looked back. And life works exactly the same way. No one prepared me for this. Sometimes growth feels like grief. Um, we grieve friendships that no longer fit. I- I've had friends that I swore I would stay friends with, and they swore to me, "We will be friends forever," because it just felt so right in that moment, for however long that was. And all of a sudden, something happened or you drifted apart, and they're no longer in your life And we grieve that friendship. We grieve the idea of what the friendship used to be, and it no longer is now in this moment. We grieve different ways of thinking. The way I used to think 10 years ago is not the way I think now. The way I thought in my 20s or in my teens is not the way I thought in my 30s or my 40s. We grieve old dreams that we had. I had this incredible dream that I was going to leave nursing in my 20s, and I was going to become a scuba dive instructor in Florida, in Boca Raton. I had it all set up. I was going to live in Boca. I was going to spend part of my time in Key Largo, and I was going to teach scuba diving. And part of me, if I'm honest, still clings onto that, that dream because it was so alive for me in that moment. And actually, what happened was I met Neil, and I fell in love, and I didn't want to move to Florida. I wanted to stay in England. But there's this little part of me that still thinks, "Oh, I wonder what that would have been like." And we also grieve roles. We grieve expectations. We grieve versions of ourself. There have been moments over the past few years when I've looked back and, and missed, really, I've missed the woman that I used to be. Not because I want to be her again, but because she was so familiar to me. She knew the rules. She knew how to play the game. She knew how to keep everyone happy. She knew how to avoid disappointment and to stay small. And then there's another part of me that whispers, "But she wasn't free. She wasn't. She really wasn't free." In my coach training, we spend a lot of time exploring where these identities began. We, we connect with our inner child because children are brilliant adapters. We become who we need to be to feel loved. We become who we need to be to belong. And maybe you became, maybe you became the good girl, or the achiever, or the peacemaker, the caretaker. Maybe you became the invisible one, or the perfectionist. Yeah, that was me. And none of these identities were wrong. They were actually very intelligent at that time. They really truly served a purpose because they helped you survive And here's what I want to say. Survival is not the same as living. Surviving day to day is not living to your fullest. And adulthood really gives us the opportunity to lovingly thank those parts, thank those little ones within us, and make a different choice. So I'd love you to pause for a moment and ask yourself, who are you beneath your roles? So not your job, not your relationship, not being someone's mom, not being somebody's daughter, or husband, or coach. Who are you? Who are you when no one is expecting anything from you? And perhaps an even more powerful question, who are you becoming? Who are you becoming that your old life can no longer contain? 'Cause there are moments now when I catch myself speaking, and I realize this isn't the Charlotte from 10 years ago. She wouldn't have had this conversation. She wouldn't have trusted her intuition. She wouldn't have spoken so openly about grief, or emotions, or healing, or our nervous system. She would've worried far more about what people thought. And, and honestly, sometimes I miss how simple life felt back then until I remember it wasn't simple. It was so small. It was so confining. I felt imprisoned and constricted. So maybe that's where you find yourself today. Maybe you feel uncomfortable. Maybe there's a part of you that feels restless, like your old life doesn't fit anymore. Maybe you've been wondering, "What's wrong with me?" What if there's nothing wrong? What if you are simply standing between two identities, one that's too small to hold who you've become, and the other that's asking you for your courage? So here's my invitation for you. Don't rush this season Don't mistake discomfort for failure, and don't assume that uncertainty means that you're on the wrong path, because sometimes uncertainty is the place where we create the most authenticity. Perhaps you're not lost. Perhaps you have simply outgrown the person that you were yesterday, and that discomfort that you're feeling is not a sign for you to go back. It's not a sign for you to go back to sleep, to continue playing small, to continue not speaking up for yourself. What if that discomfort is a sign that you are becoming? So, thank you for spending this time with me today, And as always, if this episode resonated, I would love you to share it with someone who maybe feels like they're in that in-between space where the old version of themselves doesn't fit anymore and the new version hasn't quite fully arrived yet. And if you'd like to continue the conversation, come and connect with me on Instagram _charlottedukes or on Facebook or send me an email or a text. I love to hear from all of you about who you're becoming. So, until next time, take a deep breath, trust the process, and remember you don't have to have all the answers today. And sometimes the greatest growth happens when we sit in that quiet, get curious, and ask ourselves the questions. You're all doing beautifully.