The Provisional Life: Why you're still waiting for your real life to start.
- Christine Spencer
- 4 days ago
- 8 min read
When I lose the weight.
When the kids are grown.
When things calm down.
When the timing is better.
When I feel more ready.
When I know a little more.
When the mortgage is paid off.
When work slows down.
When I have more energy.
When.
Finally.
Then.
You have a list. I know you do because I have one too, and I have never met a woman in midlife who didn't. We carry these lists around like layaway tickets for a life we've already picked out but haven't paid for yet. We know exactly what it looks like. We've been picturing it for years. We're just waiting for the right conditions to go pick it up.
The problem is the conditions never quite arrive. And while we're waiting, the present keeps happening without us.
her provisional life
Think about what's actually on your list right now. Not the big dramatic stuff necessarily — although that's on there too — but the everyday version of it.
The trip you've been meaning to take since the kids were too young and then too busy with activities and now they're technically old enough but somehow the timing still isn't quite right. The class you've been thinking about signing up for since someone mentioned it two years ago. The friend you've been meaning to call — not text, actually call — for so long that it's now been so long that calling feels weird and you're not sure how to start. The project that's been living in a document on your desktop since 2021 that you open occasionally, add a line to, and then close again with the quiet understanding that you'll really dig into it someday.
The hobby you loved before life got loud that you've quietly reclassified as something you used to do.
How long has some version of this been going on? Not the specific items — those change. But the pattern of them. The sense that the actual version of your life, the one that feels fully like you, is always about six months or one milestone or one life change away from starting.
Here's what that costs, and I want you to sit with this for a second: every single day you spend waiting for the right conditions to begin is a day that belongs to the life you actually have, spent rehearsing for the one you're waiting for. The moments that are happening right now — the ones that will become the memories you're nostalgic for in ten years — are passing while you make a plan to start living more fully later.
That's not a small cost, no matter how abundant your bank account, it will not buy you this time back.
my provisional life lesson
I want to tell you a story about my dad first, because it scared me more than anything I've ever done to myself.
My dad loved to fish. Really loved it. When he was younger, he would go fishing in almost any conditions — any time, any weather, anywhere the salt water took him. It was just what he did.
But as he got older, something shifted. A fishing trip would get planned a week or more in advance, and then the checking would begin. Weather reports. Wind forecasts. Tide charts. More weather reports. The water might be too choppy. It might be too hot. Too cold. The conditions weren't quite right. And more often than not, the trip would get cancelled or delayed, and another weekend would pass without him ever putting a line in the water.
I used to get so frustrated watching it happen. He was right there, with a boat and the water and the time, and he was finding reasons not to go. His life was passing him by and he was inside watching the weather report.
What terrified me about it — and I mean actually terrified me, in a way that stuck — was that I could see the pattern so clearly from the outside and he couldn't see it at all from the inside. The reasons always felt legitimate to him. It really was a little windy. The forecast really did look uncertain. Each individual decision to wait made sense. It was only when you added them all up that you could see what they actually were: a life that kept almost happening.
Another reason it was so terrifying to see how blind my dad was to it, was I did not want to follow this same path. I have shared with the people I love (and will most likely be by my side as my birthdays accumulate, my husband, my kids), examples of who I do not want to become as I age, and that they have my full permission to loudly and rudely call me out if I start heading in that direction. I mean it.
The thing is, I wasn't entirely exempt from the pattern I was so frustrated by. I was just doing it differently.
I have been thinking about leaving teaching since around 2018. Not casually — seriously, with the full weight of someone who knows something needs to change but doesn't yet know what shape the change should take. For a couple of years after that it was less about a specific thing and more about a feeling: I wanted autonomy over my time. I wanted to work from home, to build something that was mine, to repackage the skills I had — the teaching, the obsessive personal development consumption, the deep fascination with how people think and get stuck and find their way forward — into something that could generate both meaning and eventually some security. Something I could potentially pass down to my kids or that would leave them something real.
Sunbeams & Sequins didn't have a name or a shape until a couple of years ago, when the full force of what I was experiencing in perimenopause and midlife made the mission suddenly obvious. All of those years of searching for what I was building had quietly been pointing toward this — a brand for women navigating exactly what I was navigating, built with the tools I was desperately wishing existed.
But here's the embarrassing part. Once I knew what it was, I still didn't build it.
I was learning. I took courses about the thing I wanted to do. I researched tools and platforms and strategies. I got certified in things. I read every book. I made plans and revised the plans and made better plans. I refined the concept until it was pristine.
I told myself I was preparing. And I was, genuinely, learning things I needed to know.
But the preparing had also quietly become the avoiding. I had gotten so good at getting ready that getting ready had become the thing itself. Every time I learned something new, I found three more things I needed to know before I could actually start. Every time I got the website closer to right, I found something else that wasn't quite ready yet.
I perfected my way into standing still.
The difference between me and my dad on the dock was smaller than I wanted to admit. He was waiting for perfect weather. I was waiting for perfect preparation. Both of us were standing very still while the water moved without us.
My dad passed away without taking nearly as many fishing trips as he should have. His grandchildren have fewer memories of being on that boat with him than any of us would choose. I don't say that to be unkind to his memory — I say it because it is the truest possible illustration of what the provisional life actually costs when you let it run long enough. The conditions were never going to be right enough. They never are. And now the boat sits somewhere and the water keeps moving and we can't go back and get those mornings.
I think about that more than I'd like to admit.
the Research
Here's something psychologists have been studying for a while now: humans are genuinely bad at connecting with their future selves.
Brain imaging research shows that when people think about their future self, the neural patterns look more like thinking about a stranger than thinking about themselves. Which means the future version of you — the one who will benefit from the thing you're putting off — doesn't feel like you. She feels like someone else. And it turns out we're much more willing to defer things to someone else than we are to take them on ourselves.
This is why "I'll start on Monday" has ended approximately every diet, exercise program, creative project, and life change in human history. Monday-you is a stranger. Monday-you can handle it. You are just very tired right now.
The other thing research consistently shows is that the gap between intention and action is almost never closed by more planning. It's closed by starting — specifically, by taking one small concrete action in the direction of the thing, which creates momentum, which creates the next action. The psychological term for this is implementation intention, and the short version is: people who decide I will do this specific thing at this specific time are significantly more likely to actually do it than people who say I intend to do this eventually.
Eventually is not a day of the week.
There is one question that cuts through the provisional life faster than anything else I've found. It doesn't require a plan or a timeline or the right conditions. It just requires honesty.
the Question
So here are the two questions I want you to sit with. Not together — separately, because they're getting at two different things.
The first one: what would you do this week if you already had permission?
Not someday. Not when the conditions improve. Not when you feel more ready. This week. One thing. If the permission you've been waiting for arrived in your inbox this morning — from whoever you've been waiting to give it to you — what would you do before Sunday?
The second one: what would you do this week if you knew you couldn't fail?
That one is different. The first question assumes you're waiting for someone to tell you it's okay to start. The second question assumes you've already given yourself permission but fear of the outcome is the thing keeping you on the dock. Both are real. Most of us are dealing with some combination of both at any given time.
I want you to notice that neither question asks what you would do when the conditions are perfect. Neither one asks you to wait until you feel ready, because readiness follows action — it doesn't precede it. The only thing either question asks is what you would do in real time, in this actual week, in the life you actually have.
What's yours?
the permission isn't coming
Here is the thing I most want you to hear, and I want to say it as plainly as I know how.
The permission you have been waiting for is not coming from anywhere outside of you. There is no certification, no milestone, no readiness threshold, no perfect forecast that is going to arrive and tell you that now is the time.
I watched someone I loved spend years waiting for the right conditions. The conditions didn't come and the trips didn't happen and the time passed anyway — it always passes anyway — and now those mornings on the water with his grandchildren exist only as the memories nobody made.
I am not telling you that to make you sad. I am telling you that because it is the most honest answer I have to the question of what the provisional life actually costs when you let it run long enough.
This is it. This imperfect, not-quite-ready, still-figuring-it-out moment. The real version of your life isn't the one that starts when the conditions are right. It's this one. The one that is happening right now while you make a plan to start living it more fully later.
You don't need more time or more money or more certainty. You need one small thing, done this week, that belongs to the version of your life you've been putting in layaway.
Go get it, before the forecast changes again.
If you want a framework for the doing, not the planning, the actual doing, that's exactly what Unshrinking: 365 Tiny Dares was built for. One dare a day, small enough to do on the hardest Tuesday, meaningful enough to build actual evidence that you show up for yourself. Not someday. Today. Get yours here.
What's on your when-finally list? The thing you've been waiting the longest to start, the one where the timing is never quite right. You don't have to tell anyone. Just name it, even just to yourself. Sometimes that's the first dare. ✨