If you hang out in the in-between place of a transition for a while, it can start to feel like you don’t even know who you are anymore.

A drawn-out period of “figuring it out”—or the even less-empowered period that you may experience before you are taking active steps to figure it out—can get exhausting and draining to the point that it leaves you feeling like a muted, immobile version of yourself.

I’m reminded of a passage in one of my favorite YA books, The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau.

It’s a fantastic and brilliantly written story of a boy and girl growing up in an isolated city that is struggling with dire shortages of food and electricity, and working to find a way to save their city before the lights go out forever.

In this scene, Clary, a greenhouse worker, talks with Lina, a teenager.

“Clary put a hand in her pocket and drew something out. ‘Look,’ she said. In the palm of her hand was a white bean. ‘Something in this seed knows how to make a bean plant. How does it know that?’ …