This week, I found myself wondering what wisdom I could possibly offer when I am still very much inside a struggle.

Not triumphantly on the other side.
Not holding some beautiful lesson tied with a bow.
Just here, learning in the messy middle.

Over these past few months, I have been navigating a baffling conundrum — the kind of experience that defies a straightforward solution and challenges assumptions about what is helpful assistance and what becomes unhelpful interference.

I am persistent by nature. I am also a fixer. When someone I care for is suffering, my instinct is to keep searching: for the right resources, the right words, the right person, certain there must be a right solution to their painful problem.

That part of me is loving, creative, and resourceful. It is also obsessive and exhausting, especially when it forgets that I, too, am a human being in need of care.

In transformative learning theory, there is a term I have always found powerful: the disorienting dilemma. It describes an experience that contradicts what we thought we knew, forcing us to question, and perhaps even release, deeply held assumptions in favor of less familiar — and potentially more uncomfortable — ways of seeing.

I have studied this concept for years. But lately, I am not just thinking about transformation. I am living inside it.

And what I am noticing is that transformation does not feel expansive at first. It feels depleting. Confusing. Vulnerable. The default roles we know how to play are no longer the only ones being called forth.

I find that my Fixer, Advocate, and Researcher all continue to show up. But I am auditioning other roles to add to the ensemble: