The Quiet Work of Becoming Someone New

Reinvention is usually described as a moment.

A decision. A pivot. A line in the sand. The day you walked out, walked away, or finally said enough. We love that version of the story because it is clean. There is a before and an after. There is a woman who was stuck and then she was not.

But that is not how it actually works. Not for most of us.

For most of us, becoming someone new does not begin with a dramatic exit. It begins with something much smaller and much harder to explain. A feeling of distance between the life you are living and the woman you are turning into. A slow, persistent sense that the things you used to reach for (the goals, the routines, the relationships, the version of success you spent years chasing) do not quite land the way they used to.

You might not even be able to name it at first. You just know something has shifted. And the discomfort is not because something is wrong. It is because something in you is outgrowing the container you built for it.

I have felt this more than once.

The first time was during my years inside startups. I had spent over a decade growing small businesses, leading teams, navigating acquisitions, advising founders. I was good at it. The work lit me up. And then at some point, not suddenly but gradually, I started feeling the edges of that identity getting tight. The version of me that thrived on the chaos of early-stage companies was starting to want something different. Not less ambitious. Just differently ambitious.

The second time was more personal and more painful. It came during the unraveling of my marriage, the early days of co-parenting, the physical upheaval of perimenopause, and the grief of miscarriage, all happening roughly in the same window of time. I remember looking at my own life and thinking: I do not recognize any of this. And I do not recognize the woman who is supposed to be navigating it.

That is the part no one prepares you for. Not the events themselves. You can Google divorce timelines and perimenopause symptoms and co-parenting schedules. What no one tells you is that you will lose yourself in the transition. Not permanently. But thoroughly enough that you will question everything you thought you knew about who you are.

And here is what I want you to hear if you are in that place right now: that questioning is not a breakdown. It is the beginning of something MOMumental.

I think about it like the space between companies. In startup culture, there is a concept called the “messy middle,” the phase between the initial burst of building and the eventual clarity of what the company will become. It is the least glamorous phase. There are no launch parties. There is no viral moment. There is just the daily, unglamorous work of figuring out what this thing actually is now that the early version has run its course.

That is what becoming feels like. It is not a glow-up. It is not an Instagram-worthy before-and-after. It is waking up every day and making one small choice that aligns with who you are turning into instead of who you used to be. It is saying no to something that the old version of you would have said yes to. It is sitting with the discomfort of not having all the answers and choosing to stay in motion anyway.

I used to think reinvention required clarity. That I needed to know where I was going before I could leave where I was. But what I have learned, from building companies and from rebuilding my own life, is that clarity is something you earn through action. You do not wait for it. You move toward it.

When I co-founded NeonID, a company built on personality science and AI, I was doing this exact work in real time. We were building a tool that helps brands and individuals understand who they really are at their core. And I remember thinking how much I needed that same tool for myself. Underneath the roles, the titles, the responsibilities, the expectations: who was I, actually? Not who did people need me to be. Not who had I been trained to perform as. Who was the woman underneath all of that?

That question does not get answered in a weekend retreat. It gets answered in the daily, ongoing, sometimes tedious work of paying attention. Noticing what lights you up and what drains you. Noticing which relationships make you feel seen and which ones require you to shrink. Noticing where you are performing out of habit and where you are living from truth.

That is the work. It is not loud. But it is deeply, fiercely intentional. And there is nothing passive about it.

I write about this because I think women, especially women who are high-functioning, accomplished, used to holding it all together, need a space where the in-between is honored. Where you do not have to have the answer yet. Where the process itself is respected as something worth witnessing.

That is what MOMumental Reinvention is. And that is what the MOMumental Becoming looks like from the inside. Not a single courageous moment, but a thousand small ones strung together by a woman who decided she was worth the effort of becoming again.

If you are in the middle of it right now, you are not behind. You are not lost. You are becoming.

Stay with it.

MOMumentally,

Erika