What a Pottery Wheel Taught Me About Change

Over a year and a half ago, I sat down at a pottery wheel for the first time. My hands did not know what to do. The clay wobbled, collapsed, and refused to center no matter how carefully I pressed into it. After twenty years of feeling capable in a therapy room, it was humbling to feel like a complete beginner again at something so simple looking. It is not simple.

That feeling, the wobble of not knowing what you are doing anymore, is close to what many of my clients describe when they are moving through a major life transition. A divorce, a career change, an empty nest, a diagnosis, a move to a new city. The specifics differ, but the internal experience often overlaps. You lose your footing in a version of life you understood, and the new version has not solidified yet.

Holding Two Realities at Once

One of the hardest parts of transition is that it rarely feels like a single clean break. It is not that someone finishes one chapter on a Friday and confidently starts the next on Monday. Rather, a person often finds themselves holding two realities at once. Grieving what is ending while trying to build what comes next, sometimes in the very same conversation. This is why transitions can feel more exhausting than either the ending or the beginning alone. Both kinds of work are being done simultaneously.

Feeling Like a Beginner Again

There is also a specific kind of discomfort in feeling incompetent at something new, especially as an adult. Children expect to be beginners. Adults often do not extend themselves the same grace. When my hands could not control the clay, my instinct was frustration rather than curiosity. I suspect that instinct is familiar to anyone who has had to learn a new job, a new relationship, or a new identity later in life, after years of feeling steady.

What Life Transitions Therapy Looks Like

In life transitions therapy, the work usually involves slowing down enough to name both truths at once. What are you letting go of, and what does it cost you to let it go? What are you moving toward, and what makes that uncertain or frightening? Neither question cancels the other out. Both deserve space.

Letting Change Take Shape

The clay did eventually start to center, not because I forced it, but because I stopped gripping so hard and let my hands respond to what the wheel was already doing. Change tends to work the same way. It rarely responds well to force. It responds to attention, patience, and a willingness to stay present with the wobble until something new takes shape.

If you are in the middle of a transition and it feels like nothing quite fits yet, that discomfort is not a sign you are doing it wrong. It may simply be what change feels like on the way to becoming familiar.