Outgrowing the Shell

Reflections from my conversation with Narelle Walsh about quitting well, growing sideways, and what it means to be between versions of yourself.

I keep coming back to this idea that maybe not everything that ends has failed. Maybe some things just complete: a job, a relationship, a friendship, a business, or a version of ourselves that once made complete sense and slowly stopped fitting.

I've been sitting with that one for a while because, if I'm being fair, I'm not particularly good at giving up on things. I persist. I push. I try another angle. I ask someone else what I haven't thought about yet. Sometimes I keep going well beyond the point where another person would have quietly packed up their things and moved on, because there is something in me that wants to know I exhausted the options first.

And sometimes persistence matters. Sometimes the moment you most want to quit really is the moment just before something changes. But there is another question I think matters just as much: am I still moving toward something, or am I simply keeping something alive because I do not want to admit it has finished?

That question came back to me after my conversation with Narelle Walsh.

Giving It Enough Room to Get Out

Narelle talked about being in a high-pressure corporate role, raising her children, and going through the breakdown of her marriage, all while knowing somewhere underneath it that the version of life she was living was not working anymore. Then she took her first real holiday in years and, within about twelve hours, she knew she was going to quit her job.

What struck me was not how quickly she made the decision. It was that I do not think the answer suddenly appeared on that holiday. I think the answer had been there for a while, waiting beneath all the noise, and she finally gave it enough space to get out.

We do this all the time. We fill the day, fill the silence, listen to something while we drive, scroll while we wait, answer another email, solve another problem, start another task. Underneath all of that movement, I think our bodies often already know something. We just have not given ourselves enough room to hear it.

Narelle described exactly that. When she needs to work out what is happening for her, she needs quiet, less stimulation, no screens, and time in nature if she can get it. She needs enough space to get out of her head and back into her body, and then she can ask herself the honest questions.

I understand that. I do not always know what I think while I am still inside the noise either. Sometimes I need to leave the conversation, sleep on it, get outside, get on the water, or let my nervous system settle before I can actually work out what something means to me. I do not think there is anything wrong with that. The gap is doing something. The gap creates space.

Between Shells

I've used the metaphor of a crab shell before because, as a marine biologist, apparently even my existential crises need marine life involved. A crab cannot keep growing inside the same shell. Eventually, the thing that once protected it becomes too small, so it has to leave.

And for a while, that crab is incredibly vulnerable. Soft, exposed, not particularly well armoured. It has to find somewhere safe while the new shell hardens around its larger body.

We like talking about growth as though it is this beautiful, upward-moving thing. Stretch goals. Personal development. Becoming your best self. Lovely. But growth is a stretch because stretching is uncomfortable. Sometimes it feels like not quite fitting in your own life anymore. Sometimes it looks like knowing the old thing is no longer right while having absolutely no idea what the new thing is.

Sometimes you have left the shell, but the next version of you has not hardened yet.

Narelle described a period like that too. After leaving her corporate role, she did not instantly emerge with a shiny new identity and a perfect five-year plan. She went back to hospitality and took the time she needed to work out what she actually wanted next. Eventually, she went back to university as a mature-age student, studied journalism and marketing, and began building work that gave her more of what she actually wanted: freedom, creativity, travel, family time and the ability to live on her own terms.

Maybe she was not lost. Maybe she was between shells.

I think we need more permission for that stage: the part where you do not know yet, where you are experimenting, where you feel slightly exposed because the old labels do not fit but the new ones have not quite arrived. You do not need to become the next version of yourself immediately. There is allowed to be space between the two.

A Full Life Can Still Be Too Full

Near the end of our conversation, Narelle mentioned one of her vision boarding sessions. I started to say that life was pretty full, and then I realised that was actually the point. There is a difference between a life being empty and a life being so full of good things that you cannot hear yourself think.

A full life can still be too full. Too full to notice what is changing. Too full to recognise what you have outgrown. Too full to hear the quiet little thought that keeps saying, this is not working anymore.

Maybe that is why things sometimes become obvious on holidays, walks, long drives, weekends away, or random mornings when there is finally nothing demanding an answer from you. The insight did not necessarily appear in that moment. The noise just disappeared long enough for you to notice it.

Play Without Needing to Know the Outcome

And this is where I think play becomes far more important than we give it credit for. Play does not require us to know the outcome. Play asks questions such as: what happens if I try this? What if I say yes? What if I meet these people, take that class, make that thing, or change direction?

Narelle described play as those unexpected moments where she notices herself feeling joy without having planned it. The moments where she laughs, smiles, stops thinking about everything else and feels her whole body come alive.

I think those moments tell us things. This feels good. This feels expansive. This feels like me. Maybe there is something here.

Play gives us somewhere to experiment before we know exactly what we are becoming. It gives us a lower-stakes way to follow curiosity before we are ready to call it a plan, a pivot, or a whole new chapter. Sometimes play is the first place the next version of our life gets to speak.

Being Seen From Another Angle

There was another part of our conversation that stayed with me too. Narelle spent a lot of time talking about helping other people into the spotlight rather than wanting it for herself. And yet, for almost a decade, she has also worked as a life-drawing model.

There is something wonderfully contradictory about that. Standing naked in front of a room full of people is, quite literally, putting yourself where everybody can see you. No costume, no carefully chosen version of yourself, nothing much to hide behind.

What Narelle said she loves about it is that she gets to see versions of herself she would never otherwise see, through the way other people interpret and draw her. That landed for me, because we can only ever see ourselves from where we are standing.

Other people sometimes see things we cannot: confidence, courage, leadership, creativity, potential. Sometimes they also see the bits we would rather not look at, which is significantly less fun, but probably just as useful.

Maybe part of growth is allowing ourselves to be seen from another angle. This does not mean handing somebody else the authority to tell us who we are. It means being curious enough to ask: what are you seeing that I might not be able to see from here? Then we get to decide what we do with the answer.

What It Means to Be Complete

I do not think growing means throwing every previous version of ourselves away. The crab does not become something completely different every time it moults. It carries forward what it has become. But it does have to leave something behind: an old belief, an identity, a role, a relationship, a way of working, or something that once fitted perfectly and does not anymore.

Narelle talks warmly about being a stay-at-home mum, riding her bike to school, baking, coaching soccer and raising her kids. She also talks about that life feeling like another lifetime now. Both can be true. You can have loved something and outgrown it. You can be grateful for a chapter and still close it. You can change your mind without making your previous choice a mistake.

I used to think some endings meant I had failed. I do not really believe that now. There are relationships in my life that have continued beautifully despite distance and years. We send each other memes, have ad hoc conversations, and when we eventually land in the same place again it feels like no time has passed. There are others that have not.

There are also parts of my life I can now look at and simply say: that was real, it mattered, I learnt from it, and it is complete.

That does not mean everything about the ending was okay. It does not mean there was no hurt. It does not mean we rewrite history into something neat and meaningful just so we can feel better about it. It simply means we stop asking something that has ended to keep providing us with a future.

Maybe there are things in your life right now that still need persistence. Maybe you really are one degree away from the breakthrough. And maybe there is something else you have been trying to breathe life back into long after you already knew.

I do not have a five-step test for telling the difference. I wish I did. For me, it seems to involve persistence, curiosity, asking other people what I cannot see, and eventually creating enough quiet to hear what I already know.

Growth requires vulnerability. There is no way around that bit. If we want to become bigger than the life we are currently living, something eventually has to stretch. Sometimes something has to crack.

You do not have to hate the old shell. You do not have to pretend it never protected you. You do not even have to regret living inside it. You can be grateful for what it gave you and still know you cannot live there anymore.

Maybe it did not fail. Maybe it was simply complete.