After the Reinvention

My “After the Reinvention” article first appeared on my Substack, Margaretha Montagu’s Stories.

Reinventing yourself, reconstructing your life, against all odds, succeeding, sailing over all the hurdles, is such a deeply satisfying thing to do. A couple of years later, on a timid spring morning, a pale sun just cresting the hill, turning an unexpected late frost into a field of diamonds at the feet of pitchback Friesian horses that are embodying their frustration with the late arrival of their breakfast, I was asking myself, ” Why do I feel so demotivated? So discontent, so vaguely depressed?”

I did it. I built a new life for myself and for my horses, on a little farm in the (mostly) sun-blessed southwest of France, where I host Camino de Santiago walking retreats. I realised my dream. I am, honestly, intensely grateful that I have made it this far, despite all the blood-curdling challenges.

But I did’t feel as inspired as I used to feel.

On the next retreat, I met Susan. Susan arrived at Maison Meraki with the look of someone who had recently made a very significant decision and was beginning to have very significant doubts about it.

She’d driven down from Paris. Fifty-three years old. Divorce finalised three years ago. Kids grown, gone, launched. She’d spent the past two years doing what she called, with a self-deprecating wave of her hand, “the reinvention thing” — therapy, a ceramics class, learning to tango, a solo trip to Portugal, a new job she actually liked. She’d done it. She’d started again. She was, by her own account, well.

And yet.

She sat at the al fresco table that first evening, picking at a bowl of garbure — that thick, smoky Gascon soup that smells like someone’s grandmother has been slow-cooking love itself since Tuesday morning — and she had the eyes of a person who had lost her way.

“I don’t know why I feel like this,” she said, to no one in particular, and then looked slightly horrified that she’d said it out loud.

I’ve been organising walking retreats on the Camino du Puy — the old pilgrim route that winds south from Le Puy-en-Velay through the oak and sunflower country of the Gers — for a few years now, out here in the south-west of France where the light turns the colour of old honey in the late afternoon and the sunflowers have the audacity to face you directly, like they’re waiting for an answer to a question. I’ve watched a lot of people walk through the middle of their stories.

We talk a lot about the courage to start. The leap. The pivot. The new chapter. There are approximately nine thousand podcasts about it and at least four books on your nightstand with some variation of Begin or Start in the title. Starting again is, culturally speaking, a huge achievement. We love a phoenix. We love a comeback. We’ll throw a party for the woman who finally left the marriage on the way to nowhere, changed careers, and signed up for the PhD.

What we talk about far less is what happens about two years later. The part where the novelty has been fully metabolised, the adrenaline of the decision is (regretfully) a distant memory, and you’re just… cruising. Getting up and doing your thing again and again and again. Not because it’s new and terrifying and therefore secretly thrilling, but because this is your life now, and it’s good — genuinely good — except that it doesn’t feel that good anymore. It feels boring. It feels exhausting. It feels meaningless.

This is the unexpected grey zone. Just uniformly grey, no hundred shades to it. The place where the new life you built with such courage stops feeling new, and starts feeling ordinary, and you find yourself wondering, with a creeping unease you’re almost ashamed of, whether this was actually worth it. Whether you’re actually in a better place. Whether the whole reinvention was worth it, or just a story you told yourself while fueled by adrenaline.

Susan, I would discover over the next few days, was deep in the grey zone. Had been for months.

The next morning, my guests set off through the village and past the boulangerie, where someone was already pulling trays from the oven, the smell of warm bread hanging in the cool air as a promise of an edible miracle. The path south of Nogaro descended almost immediately — this section of the route has a sense of humour involving thighs — and within twenty minutes the walkers were in the oak forest, the light coming through in long pale fingers, the path underfoot a soft carpet of last year’s leaves that muffled everything to a kind of held-breath quiet.

I watched them leave, as I always do, with a noisette (small expresso) to handand the mild envy of someone who has organised the adventure rather than gone on it. By late afternoon I’d caught up with the group again — a mossy stone wall beside a field where two horses stood in companionable silence, flicking flies with their tails — and I found Susan sitting slightly apart from the others, boots off, staring at nothing in particular with the focused intensity of someone having a very unpleasant internal conversation.

I sat down beside her and waited. The horses swished. The valley below shimmered in the heat.

“I thought it would feel different,” she said eventually.

“The walk?”

“My life.” She turned her water bottle in her hands. “I did the work. Genuinely. I made substantial changes. I built something new. The job is good. I have friends. I’m not unhappy.” A pause that carried some weight. “I’m just… not enjoying it anymore. Like the colour’s turned down on everything and I can’t find the dial.”

Initially, she’d thought that it was just a bad patch. Now it was late spring, the fields around us were an almost offensive shade of green, the wild orchids were out along sides of the path, and she still felt as though she were watching her own life through glass. She’d stopped going to the ceramics class. No longer want to learn how to tango. She’d cancelled plans with her friends. She’d withdrawn. She’d started wondering, seriously and with a kind of cold logic that frightened her a little, whether the whole reinvention had simply been the result of trying desperately to cope with a crisis — whether she had, now, in some important sense, run out of reasons to keep going.

“Not dramatically,” she said quickly, catching my expression. “I’m not — I just mean I’ve lost momentum. Reasons to keep going. It all feels a bit what’s the point of it all?“

I recognised the feeling. “I sound so ungrateful, don’t I?”

I’ve walked this path — metaphorically, since my own knees have opinions — long enough to recognise the particular flavour of what Susan was describing. It’s not failure. It’s not even depression, necessarily, though it can shade into it if you leave it unattended. It’s something more specific to reinvention: the anticlimax that follows the high.

Starting again generates its own energy. The decision itself is electric. Then you build your new life, and if you’ve done it well, if you’ve been brave and intentional and done the therapy and taken the ceramics class and booked the solo trip — you end up somewhere genuinely better. But then you have to live there. Quietly. Without the drama of transformation to power you forward.

Watching pilgrims walk the Camino I’ve learned that the ones who find it hardest are not the unfit ones or the underprepared ones or even the ones with the least motivation. They’re the ones who thought that by this point — whatever point they’d fixed in their minds — they would feel different. Settled. Content. Fulfilled. Done.

It was late afternoon, the sky over the Gers gone that improbable luminous gold, when Susan caught up with me as I was getting dinner ready. She was sunburned across the nose and looked like she’d been crying, which she clearly had, and also like she felt much better, which she also clearly did.

She’d stopped, she said, at a spot where the path curved around a wide field of sunflowers, thousands of them, all turned the same direction with their absurd, devoted, slightly gormless faces. Something about the spectacle of all that bright yellow, all that uncomplicated aliveness, had just completely undone her. She’d sat in the grass at the field’s edge and cried for about fifteen minutes for no reason she could name and then felt, for the first time in months, like herself.

“I think I’ve been waiting to feel motivated,” she said. “Like motivation would come back and then I’d know I was okay. But maybe that’s not how it works.”

It’s not, I told her. Motivation is a tourist. It shows up enthusiastically, takes a lot of photos, and leaves. What keeps you going after motivation has caught its flight home is something quieter and less glamorous. Purpose.

Not motivation, nor discipline, or even rest. Purpose. In the early days of reinvention, purpose is built in: rebuilding yourself is your purpose. You are the project. But a few years on, when the reconstruction is largely done and the new life is humming along perfectly adequately, that scaffolding quietly disintegrates — and nobody warned you that it was structural. You’re left with a good life that somehow doesn’t feel like it’s worth bothering with. The answer, I think, isn’t to start over yet again (tempting though that is — at least a crisis has momentum). It’s to do something subtler, more deliberate and much harder: to consciously readjust your purpose. To ask, “what/who is this new life actually in service of?”

Whether that’s all that’s needed, I’m not sure yet. Maintaining friendships, being grateful, being generous, etc., is also important, but when you have a well-defined and aligned-with-your-values purpose, it definitely makes it easier to keep going.

Ages ago, I created an online course, the Purpose Pivot, and I find myself revisiting it and adjusting it now— so that not only people who want to make a change, but also people who have made the change, done the work and are now stuck in a swamp on the other side can find the courage to keep going. You can find out more about this course here.

I gave Susan access to the course to see if it would be of use to her, during the retreat. She finished it in two days. She went home to the same new job, the same empty nest, the same long, ordinary stretch of days.

But with a new understanding: that continuing takes its own kind of courage. It’s less cinematic than starting. Harder to celebrate. Nobody throws a party for the woman who just… kept going. Who got up on a grey morning and went to work and watered the plants and texted the friend back and chose, quietly and without fanfare, not to give up on the life she’d so bravely built.

Because she has a purpose.

I find that quite helpful, on my greyer days. I hope Susan does too.

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If you’re a couple of years after your own reinvention — still going, but running low on motivation — I’d love to hear from you. Especially if you’ve found a way to keep going.