How Do I Hold Onto Myself When Nothing Is Going the Way I Planned?

You catch yourself introducing yourself and almost mentioning the job you no longer have. Someone asks what you’ve been up to, and you don’t know how to answer anymore. You look around your own house and realize almost everything has changed except the question quietly following you from room to room.

Am I disappearing?

It’s not that you feel like someone else. It’s that the person you were no longer quite explains your life.

Sometimes the hardest part is that everyone else is adjusting to who you’re becoming at exactly the same time you are. Partners, friends, coworkers, parents, all orienting to someone new while you’re still meeting that person yourself.

This Has a Name: Matrescence

In 1973, medical anthropologist Dana Raphael coined a term for exactly this experience: matrescence, the developmental transition into parenthood, comparable in scope to adolescence. Clinical psychologist Aurélie Athan has since expanded the concept, describing a transformation that reaches into biology, psychology, relationships, and a person’s whole sense of meaning, unfolding over months and years rather than arriving all at once.

The term was coined to describe the maternal experience specifically, but the developmental transition it names isn’t about gender identity. It’s about carrying and delivering a pregnancy. Trans men and non-binary people who are pregnant go through the same real neurological and psychological reorganization Raphael and Athan describe, whatever language they use for their own experience of it.

Most people imagine becoming a parent as adding a role on top of who they already are, like picking up a new job or a new hobby. Matrescence suggests something much larger. Becoming a parent isn’t addition. It’s becoming a different person, the way adolescence didn’t add a role to childhood but replaced the child with someone genuinely new.

Why This Transition Feels Different From Every Other One

Adolescence, whatever else is hard about it, at least unfolds slowly, across years, with room to try on different versions of yourself before settling into one. This transition doesn’t offer that kind of room. It compresses a comparable identity shift into months, while removing almost every fixed point you might have used to steady yourself along the way: the timeline you built your expectations around can shift without warning, the birth can happen differently than planned, the baby’s actual needs are unknowable until they arrive and demand to be met immediately, the schedule that used to hold your days together simply stops existing.

You’re being asked to become someone new while nothing around you holds still long enough to watch it happen. Am I disappearing? isn’t a strange question to be asking in the middle of that. It’s close to the only honest one available.

The Version of You That Already Did Its Job

Here’s a harder way to say what’s actually happening, and a gentler one underneath it. You’re not trying to hold onto yourself, exactly. You’re trying to hold onto a version of yourself that has already done its job. That version isn’t being erased. It’s becoming the soil from which the next version grows, present in everything that follows.

Some Parts of You Really Won’t Come With You

That reframe doesn’t mean nothing is actually lost, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty. Some parts of you really won’t come with you into whoever you’re becoming. The person who could leave the house without planning around naps. The relationships that didn’t yet have to make room for someone new. The certainty about where your days were headed. The version of you who could imagine the future without first wondering who else might need you inside it.

Mourning those things isn’t resisting parenthood. It’s how people move honestly from one life into another, instead of pretending the move cost them nothing.

You’re Allowed to Be an Unfinished Draft

Uncertainty about which parts of you are staying, which are changing shape, and which haven’t revealed themselves yet is what the middle of a real becoming is supposed to feel like, long before it resolves into whoever you actually are on the other side of it.

The question was never whether pregnancy would change you. It always would.

What’s harder to know, especially in the middle of it, is which parts of you are only changing shape, and which are honestly, permanently gone.

But what grows from that soil is not simply happening to you. You have real say in it, in the small, repeated choices about who you want to become inside all of this. And most people, somewhere along the way, catch an unexpected glimpse of someone unmistakably themselves again, not unchanged, but recognizable, standing in the middle of a life that looks nothing like the one they left.