Entering the Abyss

On the free fall between the career you left and the one you can't see yet - and why the only way through it is to want to be in there.

There is an interesting phase of when you decide it’s time for a career change that I refer to as The Abyss.

On the face of it, it sounds scary, right?

A bottomless hole that you fall into, never knowing whether you can climb out, or, if there is actually an exit somewhere deep down in there.

I’ve noticed that this Abyss - the period of falling uncertainty with little direction besides downward - is the reason many folks avoid the challenge of making a major (or even minor) career change.

In other words - if we suspect the Abyss is forthcoming, we get scared. And what do we do when we get scared?

We flee.

At least most of the time.

There are, of course, times in life when we are scared and, yet, we keep going.

Roller coasters. Haunted houses.

In those cases, we know there is an end point in site. And, so, we realize that the period of fear is temporary. For some reason or another, that makes it easier to stick with it.

Not so with the Abyss. Because, despite the fact that on some level we know it really can’t last forever, when we’re in it, it does not feel that way at all. It truly feels like the Abyss has no bottom. Much like scuba diving, when you hit a certain depth, you can’t tell which way is up and which is down, and both seem to go on forever in either direction.

It’s completely disorienting.

I distinctly remember entering the Abyss in my own career.

It was the beginning of 2022, I had just left my law firm, and had quite literally no idea as to what I was going to do next. And, no amount of advice or comfort or third party insight helped the fact that I was certain I was falling into a hole with no discernible exit point.

It was terrifying. And, yet, I knew it was also necessary. I don’t know how I knew, but I just knew.

And, so, I stuck with it. And it sucked. At the time, much like sitting through a really painful first date, I wished it would just end. And, in this case, I couldn’t even ask for the bill and leave.

That Abyss lasted for a period of about a year. It was better at times and worse at times. But, it was a year of really bumping around in the dark, waiting for clarity, trying new things, and quite seriously just having no idea what was really going to happen.

And, I don’t know if there is anything that could have made it go quicker. People will tell you that you can do things or think things or feel things to make it pass more rapidly, but I seriously don’t believe that.

These things have a way of simply having their own schedule. Which really doesn’t jive nicely with how most of us are wired - we want things to happen quickly, we value efficiency above almost all else, and if we don’t see productivity, we are convinced something is wrong.

And, so, being patient - sitting in my dirty diaper for that long (as my old therapist would put it) was simply necessary. As Rumi may have put it, the wound was the work.

It took the time it needed to take for me to come to my own realizations and knowledge. That included enjoyment but also suffering, learning about myself and what I really cared about, and making enough mistakes (and having enough successes) to have a better idea of to what I could turn next.

And, for better or worse, there is no way I could have expedited that.

The real question then is - if we know we can’t make time move faster - how can we make the time that we are in the Abyss feel better?

Well, let’s go back to fear. In a weird way, we need to want to be in the space we’re afraid of. We need to want to be in the Abyss. We need to reframe the thing we’re afraid of into the thing that we actually want more of. We have to want to go through it and know that, at some point, it will end - and - we’ll be better off for having gone through that.

That may require a leap of faith. And any leap of faith - any jump across a chasm in the Kierkegaardian sense - requires courage.

I often tell folks in my workshops (drawing on the work of David Whyte) that the root word of “courage” is “coeur” - the French for “heart”.

Meaning - if we have courage in the face of fear, we are learning to have a heart for - or love, if you want to get mushy about it - the thing that we have been avoiding - the thing that we have been afraid of.

And, ultimately, I think that’s the real job here. To learn to love what is happening for us - even when it’s in the shitty, deep, dark, scary, annoying, frustrating Abyss. Because, since we can’t get out of there any faster than time will allow, we might as well love it while we’re in there.

P.S. The next cohort of our community, the Pursuers of More starts in September. There are 2 spots left.

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Jordan Nahmias is the founder of Unstuck Consulting, an executive coaching practice for lawyers and other professionals. A former entertainment law partner in Toronto, he helps high performers navigate burnout, career transition, and identity.

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