yes, i’m changing: on outgrowing your old life before your new one arrives.

There are moments where change begins long before you can explain it. You feel it as a quiet pressure under the surface, something shifting without permission. A song hits differently, or a single lyric lands deeper than you expect. That is what happened for me with Tame Impala’s “Yes I’m Changing”. It felt like someone finally naming a feeling I had been carrying without language. And most people feel this shift long before anyone else notices. Internal change never announces itself. It starts on its own. Quietly, slowly, and in ways only you notice.

Sometimes you feel yourself pulling away from the older version of you. Not in a sudden break or a dramatic departure, more like drifting. The person you used to be feels distant, even if the people around you still treat that version as the default. My family still calls me Joe, even though I have gone by Josiah for years now. They are not wrong or unkind, just anchored to the version they remember. It is strange how your own name can remind you of who you no longer are. You see how easily people freeze you in time.

It is a lot like running into someone you have not spoken to in years. Both of you look at each other through an outdated lens, unaware of how much the other has changed. People from high school probably still picture me as the quiet version of myself who had barely started stepping out of my comfort zone. They would not recognize the years that followed, the parts that have cracked open and rebuilt themselves, the ways I have discovered who I am and who I am still becoming. And I know I do the same to them. In my memory they are still the people they were at seventeen, even though they have lived whole lives since then.

There is a line in the song where he says, ‘They say people never change, but that’s bullshit, they do.’ I used to hear that and think of other people, the ones who drifted and grew while I felt stuck in the same place. I hear it differently these days, in a way that feels like it is about me.

Transitional identity is uncomfortable because two versions of you have lived in the same place. You are not who you were, but you are also not fully who you are becoming. You exist in this space where everything feels like a work in progress. It makes you question yourself even when you know something real is happening inside. People around you update slowly. They respond to your past patterns. They remember who you used to be and assume the same rules still apply. You are left navigating the gap between who you are now and who they expect, held in place by other people’s memories.

It is a strange kind of isolation, being misread by the people who know you best. They are not doing anything wrong. They just cannot see what changed because there is nothing visible yet. You have grown internally, but externally you look unchanged. Meanwhile the real work continues in quieter places. Most progress looks like small internal adjustments, the steady work of rethinking and unlearning. Sitting with discomfort. Rebuilding parts of yourself that once felt fixed. You start to notice the smallest changes. The way you respond differently. The way your choices match the person you are becoming.

When you work on something long term, especially something that spans years, you start to feel both ahead of yourself and behind everyone else. You know where you are trying to go and you can feel the pull forward, but there is nothing to show yet. From the outside, nothing looks different. The world moves at one pace and your growth moves at another. This stage in life is painfully slow and often invisible. And it is usually the point when people begin to doubt you, sometimes without meaning to.

The hardest part of reinvention is that no one believes in it until they can observe the outcome. You understand the change inside you. You feel the shift each day. But no one else can visualize the version of you that is still forming. People believe what they can see, but until then they default to what they already know. That gap between understanding and belief is where a lot of quiet loneliness comes from. You know what you are building, but you cannot show it yet. And until you can, you exist in a space where only you recognize the direction you are moving.

Some feelings don't fit our everyday language, especially ones that change us from the inside out. A song like “Yes I’m Changing” becomes a translator for what you cannot explain. It shapes the half-finished version of you that you are still trying to understand. Music speaks for you when your own voice feels incomplete. It bridges the distance between the person you are now and the one you are becoming. It gives you a way to exist in a moment no one else can see.

Eventually, the work you have been doing internally starts to show. Not suddenly and not all at once, but in small signs. The world recalibrates. People begin to respond to the present version of you instead of the past one. What once felt lonely starts to feel like alignment. You grow into the life you have been preparing for quietly. And when that happens, you understand that the waiting was not wasted time. It was part of the becoming.

There isn’t anything dramatic about actual change. It is subtle and requires patience. It is the slow recognition that you are allowed to outgrow the old version of your life before the new one arrives. You keep becoming who you need to be, even before anyone else believes it. And eventually, the world sees what you have known all along.