I recently read Big Feelings: How to Be Okay When Things Are Not Okay, by Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy, and it’s where this month’s idea came from. The book takes seven hard feelings, one chapter each, with Liz’s drawings throughout, which manage to be funny and exact at the same time.
Let me explain.
There’s a line usually credited to Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher: the only constant is change. He didn’t write it in those words. Nothing of his survives whole, and what reached us came secondhand. Plato has Socrates describe his idea as a river you can’t step into twice, because other water is always flowing in. A biographer writing about seven hundred years later summed him up in four words: “nothing endures but change.”
That line usually gets said to people at the start of things, a new job or a new city, when it sounds like encouragement. Later in life it lands differently. By now change has taken real things: a job that was part of who you were, and more than one person you loved. You’ve had the proof for decades.
What interests me is how people react to it. A big change has a before, a during and an after, and each comes with feelings of its own. Before, there’s the not-knowing. During, there are the feelings people tend to keep to themselves. After, there’s the looking back. Retirement, a move, a diagnosis, losing someone: the details couldn’t be more different, and the feelings are surprisingly alike.
That’s what I want to write about this month. At the end of September I said October would be about the big changes: what they take, what they hand back, and who you turn out to be on the other side. So each Sunday takes one of those feelings, in roughly the order they arrive. First what it does to you, taken seriously, and only then what it can turn into.
I’m writing about this from inside it. As I write this, my family is working out what it would mean to move to another country. My husband has been offered a job abroad, and nothing is decided yet. I’ve noticed how much room the uncertainty takes up in my head right now. I can find pros and cons for either option. It’s the not knowing that’s exhausting.
Maybe you’re carrying a question like that too. For some of you it’s the house, and whether to stay or move closer to a daughter. For others it’s driving at night, or what the doctor meant by “let’s keep an eye on it,” or a husband who lost his train of thought twice last month and laughed it off both times.
You can probably make a list of pros and cons for some of these, the way I can for mine. The list rarely settles anything, because the answer depends on things that haven’t happened yet. There’s no appointment where someone hands it to you. So you carry the question around, and it takes up room.
Why the not-knowing wears you out
Uncertainty is the first of this month’s feelings, and the hardest to explain to anyone else, because from the outside nothing is happening. In my case nothing has been decided yet. Your days may look exactly the way they did last year.
People describe a tiredness they can’t point to. Many notice that once a hard answer finally arrives, it’s easier to carry than the months of not having one. You may have seen it in a friend: the bad news comes, and she seems steadier the week after than she did the month before.
Researchers have measured this, in an experiment involving rocks, snakes and mild electric shocks, and the result explains a lot about the questions you’re carrying.
Even bad news is often easier to live with than not knowing.
You’ve also done this before, more often than you’d guess. Every big change you’ve lived through had a stretch of not-knowing in front of it: the job you weren’t sure you’d get, the move to a city where you knew exactly one person. You remember what came after much better than the stretch itself. But you got through every one.
So the question for this Sunday is different from “how do I make the not-knowing go away?” Most of it won’t go away. The useful question is narrower: why is open-ended uncertainty so tiring, and how do you live inside it instead of waiting for it to end?
What You’ll Find Below
✅ The rocks-and-snakes experiment — what happened when researchers measured stress at different odds of bad news, and why the worst number wasn’t the one you’d expect
✅ An inventory you already own — a short exercise built from the changes you’ve come through, which tells you more about the next one than any prediction could
✅ The part you can shrink and the part you can’t — how to tell them apart, and what to do with each
✅ “What if this time I don’t have it in me?” — the fear underneath all of it, answered straight
✅ And everything else a Plus membership carries — the full archive and a new Fun Pack every month.