You are allowed to grieve the thing you chose.

Nobody tells you that part.

I spent time as an end-of-life coach and grief coach before this work fully became what it is now. What I learned in that season never left me. Mostly because grief does not stay in its lane. It shows up everywhere, including in your business, and we almost never name it there.

We think of grief as belonging to death. To endings we did not choose. To loss that is obvious and nameable and comes with condolences and (if we’re lucky) time off.

But grief also lives in the good stuff. In the transitions you wanted. In the evolution you worked for. In the offer you outgrew, the identity you left behind, the version of yourself you were too busy building past to ever properly say goodbye to.

Becoming a mother is the example I come back to often. You can want it completely, love it fully, and still grieve the person you were before. Both things are true at the same time. The joy does not cancel the loss. The loss does not cancel the joy.

The same is true in business.

When you close an offer that served you well, when you outgrow a business model, when you wake up one day and realize the identity you built your whole brand around is no longer who you are, there is grief in that. Even if you are the one who chose it. Even if you are excited about what is coming next.

The entrepreneurship world does not make much room for this. We are taught to keep going. To stay positive. To trust the process. And in the pressure to stay aligned and high vibe, we bypass the part of us that is still hurting and drag that open wound straight into the next thing we are building.

This is where I live. This in-between space. The liminal. The threshold. Where the old thing is done or mostly done and the new thing is not yet fully formed. Where who you are becoming is still unclear and there is enormous pressure to move through it quickly and arrive somewhere solid.

But what you skip in the middle is what you miss becoming.

If you bypass the in-between, you create a fraction of the person you could have become on the other side. You carry the wound instead of the scar. You bring the unprocessed grief into your next offer, your next launch, your next identity, and wonder why it feels hollow or heavy or like it still does not quite fit.

The scar is the wisdom. The open wound is what happens when you skip the middle.

Slowing down here does not mean staying stuck. It means naming what is ending. Letting yourself be sad about it, even for a moment, even if you also cannot wait for what is next. Letting both things be true in the same hand at the same time.

Name the transition. Say it plainly. I am not this anymore. I am not yet that. And I am allowed to grieve the space in between.

The in-between is not a problem to solve. It is where you are forged. And who you become inside it depends entirely on whether you are willing to be there long enough to let it do its work.

The in-between is where Heretical Heart Metamorphosis does its work. Six months. A small intimate container. We go through the fire together. If you are in the threshold right now and you do not want to navigate it alone, the next cohort opens in January. Get on the waitlist at ayprilporter.com.