When Life Uproots You, Get Ready To Rise

Being uprooted is what happens when the ground you trusted changes shape. A layoff that wasn’t on your calendar. A diagnosis that wasn’t in your plans. A divorce you didn’t choose. Uprooting can be dramatic or quiet, but it always feels the same in the body: disorientation, grief, and a sharp sense that the life you were building no longer lines up with your feet.

Being uprooted doesn’t mean you failed. It means life shifted faster than your nervous system. The work now is not to “bounce back.” The work is to find the strength to stand, rise differently, and on purpose.

WHAT “UPROOTED” ACTUALLY MEANS

To be uprooted is to lose one or more of your anchors such as a role, routine, available resources, a relationship, or your identity. This can happen for typically unhappy reasons, such as a job loss or divorce. Or it can happen for potentially happy reasons, such as becoming a new mom or falling in love. 

When your sense of stability shifts unexpectedly, your brain looks for certainty and finds… fog. You can expect some version of:

1 – Numbness or overdrive. Either you can’t feel anything, or you feel compelled to do “all the things”. Both are coping strategies of the nervous system, not personality flaws.

2 – Story spirals. There is the thing that happened. Then there is the narrative you tell about the meaning of what happened. “It’s over.” “I’m too late.” “This wouldn’t have happened if I…” Your mind tries to make sense of it. Often times, that means it fills the gap with worst-case fiction that will only disempower you. Remember, your reality is a projection of your perception.

3 – Choice blindness. You might feel like you have no choice but what you really mean is “I don’t like the choices I see.” That’s honest. It’s also manageable.

BEFORE YOU RISE, STABILIZE. 

When your life is yanked out of the known soil, the first job isn’t reinvention. It’s stabilization. Your instinct will be to survive the experience. But your first real task is to restore calm and continuity for the foreseeable future (such as 60-90 days or 1 year). This phase is not your forever plan.

You may not realize it, but you already know how to survive. You have already survived this far in life. In tough situations, your wit, instinct, and intuition are powerful guides.

It can help to have a few guardrails as you navigate the territory of surviving and stabilizing your life, such as:

1 – EMBRACE NOT KNOWING EVERYTHING. You will exhaust yourself quickly if you try to plan for every possible scenario. The upside of uncertainty is the opportunity to look at your life with fresh eyes and clarify what is truly important for you. Clarifying your priorities is an excellent way to remove distractions and unnecessary stressors.

Ask yourself, “What needs care in the next 72 hours?” At the top of the list is yourself. You need sleep, money, support, maybe childcare. Pick the smallest solvable problem and solve it. Ask a friend to help with decisions that feel overwhelming and don’t require your full participation. 

2 – NAME THE LOSS CLEARLY. Say what ended or broke such as “my role ended” or “my marriage is over.” Speak the truth about what you feel. Notice without judgment what you think you “should” feel or say. Reality spoken aloud begins the process of grief and acceptance. You cannot address a problem that you can’t acknowledge.

3 – NOTICE YOURSELF. Instability can be a siren call for stillness. In stillness, your true self can speak. It can reveal experiences and feelings that you may have suppressed. Studies show that journaling can significantly improve the speed and quality of healing. 

If your identity has shifted or changed, you might feel like there is an empty void where there was fullness and purpose. That is a normal feeling. It is not a void; it is space. Don’t rush to fill it. Powerful observations and lessons often wait in the space of stillness. 

4 – COLLECT VICTORIES. Track one action per day that protects your future self. Even better, write down your victories. Even the small wins, such as emailing the doctor, updating the resume, or taking a walk instead of scrolling can restore a sense of agency. Micro-wins are stitches. They hold you together.

CHOICE IN THE STORM

People fantasize about the grand comeback. In practice, rising is a chain of boring decisions made consistently. Five minutes of writing. One call returned. A new boundary was kept. That’s how you rebuild your capacity and power. That is how you find your strength to move forward with authenticity.

RISING IS REAL

The suggestions in this post aren’t theory. Women are amazing reinventers. We have a strong capacity to rise after setbacks and then rebuild better lives going forward:

Misty Copeland started ballet at 13, faced public scrutiny about her body and background, and rose to become the first Black woman promoted to principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre on June 30, 2015. She supposedly started “late”. Then she broke a historic ceiling in ballet for all girls, especially people of color. It wasn’t a leap; it was a thousand disciplined choices.

Viola Davis grew up in deep poverty in Central Falls, Rhode Island, long before the red carpets. She has spoken openly about hunger, housing, and how education, craft, and relentless work moved her from survival to history-making achievements. It was a journey marked by deliberate decisions stacked over years, not days.

Tina Turner left an abusive marriage with almost nothing, then rebuilt her career in her mid-40s. Her story debunks the myth of being “too late” and reminds us that rising can be powerfully loud.

Gabrielle Giffords survived a 2011 assassination attempt that caused a severe brain injury. She learned to walk and speak again, then chose advocacy, co-founding an organization dedicated to preventing gun violence. Recovery. Meaning. Movement.

These are different stories with the same architecture: women who rose from destabilizing circumstances, then chose the next intentional step, repeatedly.

A GENTLE FRAMEWORK FOR YOUR RISE

If you find yourself uprooted by life, here is a weekly practice to try. The purpose is to bring awareness to your journey and to remind you that you always have a choice.

CULTIVATE SELF-AWARENESS

Journal your answers to the following questions: 

• What feels lost?
• What remains?
• What wants to begin? 

MAKE A MONEY DATE

Make a money date with yourself to honestly look at your finances. You may need to signal safety to your nervous system and calm yourself. It is highly recommended that you know your numbers: assets, liabilities, inflows, and outflows. 

Take one tiny action that is in service to your money goals, such as cancel or consolidate a liability. Or create a service or product you can sell immediately.

STRENGTHEN YOUR SENSE OF CALM

One of the hardest parts of navigating uncertain, undesirable circumstances is staying calm. When the body is in a fight, flight, or freeze response, every decision feels overwhelming. 

Choose one daily rhythm to align with during the process. Take a 20-minute walk or 10-minute stretch. Set a consistent bedtime. Remove elements from your routine or life that drain you of energy. Add elements that nourish you. 

Protect 90 minutes a day for job-search, study, or building. Put it on the calendar like it’s rent.

DO A RELATIONSHIP AUDIT

A time of uprooting is the perfect time to edit your relationships. (It is a perfect reason, too.) Think carefully about:

• Who steadies you? Choose more of that.
• Who drains you? Choose to reset the boundary or pause regular interaction. Write and practice one boundary sentence: “I’m not available for that right now.”

CLARIFY WHAT IS IMPORTANT

In time, being uprooted might reveal itself to be a good thing. Sometimes we are uprooted because we were too comfortable to leave voluntarily, and the engagement was long past its expiration date. But, there are “gifts in the garbage”. An uprooting creates opportunity for replanting yourself in more fertile soil.

Use an uprooted experience to revisit what you really want. Consider going in a new direction, even if it seems scary or impossible. You don’t need to have all the answers right now. You simply need to open yourself to discovering what’s possible. 

Each week, do one thing that scares you. Run experiments. Test your capacity to go boldly toward what you fear. Take tiny steps. Tell others what you want to accomplish. And find a community to support your goals.

CHOOSE YOUR RISE

Your uprooting may not be your choice, but how you rise is a decision. It is entirely your choice how you will write the next chapter. Sometimes an uprooting is a fresh page to start over and choose to become an expanded expression of yourself. Learn to embrace the opportunity. 

RISE UPWARD, RISE FORWARD 

You’re not meant to return to who you were before the storm that uprooted you. Being uprooted invites you to plant differently: deeper boundaries, braver work, kinder rhythms, clearer values. 

No matter what your past has been or where you are in your journey, you are never too late, too old, or too anything to rise into writing your best comeback story yet. And you are never alone.

If you’re ready to turn the page: join the Uprooted to Uprising waitlist. You’ll get first access to the course, the Awareness Journal, and confidence coaching to go boldly towards what is already yours.