When is 'after'? Finding yourself after a life change

When life's events have knocked you sideways, and you've experienced a major transition, there's comfort in believing there's 'an after' to what's happened. 18 months since my discharge from active breast cancer treatment, I've been reflecting on the questions: Am I in 'my after'? And what would closure look like for me?

The soldier doesn't connect to the emotion of what they went through on the battlefield.'

- Dr Clare Jacobson

 No single moment

Intuitively, it feels like 'after' should follow some defining moment - in my case, a release from treatment, or for others, perhaps a funeral, the divorce papers or similar. But my own experience, and that of people I've coached, tells me there's often no single moment or point in time that marks 'the after'.

Instead, it arrives quietly, often many months after a life change, when it eventually feels safe enough to begin processing all of what's gone before. And closure? Well, I've yet to find it. Rather, I'm slowly inching towards a place of acceptance that 'after' requires constant adaptation to a new and shifting landscape. It's a landscape where my cancer no longer defines me, but I can accept that it has redefined me.

What 'after' means when uncertainty remains

This question - 'when is after?' - resurfaced just this week, when I caught up with a close friend who is living with Parkinson's disease. He described how the time before his diagnosis was one of real worry, not knowing what lay behind his symptoms. The diagnosis brought some relief, but also a new uncertainty about what the future might hold.

Rather than seeing it as 'a battle', as one consultant had described it, he made a conscious decision to lean into living: embracing his treatment, prioritising his health, and taking up activities with others which he has now come to cherish. With a smile, he told me he 'feels younger as the day progresses', and that his diagnosis has gifted him a whole world of new relationships.

What struck me about his situation, and perhaps for others living with a lifelong condition, is that 'after' isn't a destination or somewhere you arrive. It's something lived alongside uncertainty, one day at a time, and shaped by the choices we make. I reflected that perhaps that's true for me too, and for many of us, just less visibly so.

Integrating rather than 'getting over'

Connecting to our emotions after a major life event may take months or even years. It requires us to 'come home from the battlefield' to find our place of safety and the space to reassess. What I've learned is that grief, loss or that feeling of being forever changed doesn't go away; it finds its own place in our everyday lives.

At times it can weigh heavy; at other times it quietly moves with us. And when those close to us observe that we seem lighter, what they're really sensing is that we've stopped trying to push cancer, Parkinson's, loss or grief away. Instead, we've realised we were never supposed to 'get over' it; we're learning to integrate it.

And as we slowly integrate our experience, it begins to occupy less space - not because it has shrunk, but because life has grown larger around it. What's happened to us may stay the same size, but as life expands to include new experiences, relationships, and moments of joy, it becomes one part of a much bigger picture, rather than the whole of it. This idea draws on Dr Lois Tonkin's model of 'growing around grief'.

Where coaching can help

This is where I believe coaching can be at its most powerful - when we feel sufficiently safe and able to give time and space for reassessment. Here, coaching can help to surface and reassess the scripts which we have been living by. By challenging those scripts that serve us least, coaching offers space to rebuild, make room for new experiences, relationships, and moments of joy, and move with, not on from, the events that walk alongside us.

Finding your own after

So perhaps the answer to 'when is after?' is less about a particular moment in time, and more about a new life we slowly grow into. I'm still growing into mine.

If you're wondering whether you're in yours, here are three questions you might sit with:

• Who am I now, and how has what's happened redefined me?
• How am I living, and which of the scripts I've been living by no longer serve me?
• Where do I go from here, and what would I like my life to include next?

If these questions stir something in you, it may help to explore them with someone you trust: a friend, a counsellor or a coach.