Last week I left my daughter in London. She is off to her first year of college, and I am back home to a quieter house.

I knew this was coming. I had months to prepare. But knowing something is coming does not necessarily make you ready for it.

For the first few days after I got home, I noticed I was pessimistic about things that had nothing to do with her. I was harder on myself than usual, beating myself up over small mistakes I would normally shrug off. I found myself doomscrolling and staring out at the garden rather than enjoying conversation with family and friends. My energy was low.

It took me a couple of days to realize why.

I was reacting to the transition. The stage of raising young children under my roof had ended, and I had not yet settled into what comes next: a mostly empty nest, with grown children making their own way in the world.

I have written before about William Bridges’ three stages of transition: an ending, a neutral zone, and a new beginning. Previously in this blog, I have applied that model to career moves and organizational change. But our work is embedded in our lives and therefore our personal life impacts how we show up to work.

The neutral zone does not announce itself. You do not wake up and think, I am now in the space between who I was and who I am becoming. You just feel off, and if you are not paying attention, you assign the feeling to the wrong cause. I blamed jet lag. I blamed a stomach bug. What I was actually doing was grieving an ending while resisting a beginning, and it came out as pessimism, self-criticism, and isolation instead of grief.

I haven’t shared much of my personal life here. Most of what I share here comes from the office: onboarding, board dynamics, staff transitions. This one comes from home. But the pattern underneath it is the same one I have written about in a professional context. You have to notice your own role in a situation, not just the situation itself.

At work, this blind spot shows up constantly. A team goes through a reorganization, and a leader turns short-tempered without connecting it to the change underway. A board chair’s term is ending, and their engagement quietly drops off months before their last day. People pull back, get defensive, or turn critical, and everyone mistakes it for a personality shift instead of a normal reaction to a transition. The behavior gets treated as the problem, when the behavior is a symptom.

Once I connected my behaviours to the transition I was in, the behaviors started to lessen. Now I am working on actually feeling emotions I have about my daughter’s absence instead of pushing them down so they come out as counterproductive behaviors. I still need to wean myself off tracking her location and texting her more than she wants to hear from me. She needs to have her beginning without her Mom trying to control how it goes. And I need to look at the ending of her childhood as my beginning too, because this change brings a new chapter to us both.