The Myth of Smooth Growth
- Suzanne
- 8 hours ago
- 6 min read
Growth is often described as expansive.
In practice, it can feel more like losing your footing in slow (or sometimes fast!) motion.
We are sold a particular version of personal development. One that is quietly aspirational, slightly polished, and just uncomfortable enough to feel meaningful but not enough to feel destabilising. Growth, in this version, is a series of clear insights followed by steady forward movement. You learn, you apply, you improve. The arc is upward, coherent, and — importantly — still recognisable as progress.
It is a very appealing story.
It is also, for the most part, not how growth actually works.
Real growth tends to arrive in a way that is far less elegant. It interrupts rather than confirms. It unsettles rather than reassures. Instead of making you feel more certain, it often introduces a period of confusion where the things that once felt stable no longer quite hold, and the things that might replace them have not yet fully formed.
You can feel this most clearly in the middle of a transition.
Not at the beginning, where everything is still intact, and not at the end, where things have reconfigured into something new. But in that in-between space where your old ways of thinking, behaving, or being no longer quite fit, and your new ones feel unfamiliar, incomplete, or just slightly out of reach.
It is not always a comfortable place to stand.
And yet, this is often where the real work of growth is happening.
Part of the difficulty is that we tend to interpret this discomfort as a problem. If something feels unclear, destabilised, or uncertain, the instinct is to correct it. To move back toward clarity as quickly as possible. To regain a sense of control.
But what if that discomfort is not a sign that something has gone wrong?
What if it is a sign that something is changing?
What Growth Actually Feels Like
If I’m honest, most of my adult life has not felt particularly stable.
When I decided to go back into study, it didn’t feel like a clean, confident step forward. It felt like stepping into something uncertain and hoping I would be able to keep up. For years, growth looked less like progress and more like a series of small destabilisations. Learning things I didn’t yet understand. Entering spaces where I felt out of place. Letting go of ways of thinking that had once made sense without having anything fully formed to replace them.
It wasn’t a single leap. It was a long stretch of not quite knowing what I was doing.
And that is the part of growth that is often edited out of the story.
We tend to talk about the decision to change, and we tend to talk about the outcome. But the middle — the confusion, the self-doubt, the recalibration — is where most of the experience actually happens. It is also the part that feels least like progress while you are in it.
There is a particular kind of discomfort that comes with this stage. Not dramatic enough to justify stopping, but persistent enough to make you question whether you are on the right path. You can feel less certain than you did before you began. Less fluent. Less settled in your own thinking.
In some ways, growth can make you feel temporarily less like yourself.
And that can be unsettling.
Because we are not just learning new skills or ideas. We are also letting go of familiar identities. The version of you who knew what they were doing. The version of you who felt competent, grounded, clear. Growth asks you to loosen your grip on that version without immediately offering a new one in return.
So you find yourself in this strange position.
Not who you were. Not yet who you are becoming.
It is easy, in that space, to assume something has gone wrong. But over time, I’ve realised that this is not a detour from growth. It is growth.
What has changed for me, slowly, is not the presence of that discomfort but my relationship to it. I no longer expect growth to feel smooth. I expect it to feel, at least at times, uncertain, stretching, and slightly disorienting.
The difference now is that I don’t interpret that feeling as failure.
I recognise it as movement.
The Fool’s Journey: Why Growth Is Meant to Be Messy
One of the reasons I return to tarot so often is that it offers a far more honest map of growth than most self-development narratives do.
The Fool’s Journey does not begin with clarity. It begins with a step into the unknown.
There is no guarantee. No detailed plan. No fully formed identity waiting at the other end. The Fool moves forward anyway, not because everything makes sense, but because something calls.
And once that step is taken, the journey that follows is anything but smooth.
There are moments of confidence and capability. Moments where things seem to fall into place. But these sit alongside periods of uncertainty, misjudgement, recalibration, and pause. The path winds. It loops. It stalls. It surprises.
If you look at the journey as a whole, it becomes clear that growth is not a straight ascent toward a better, more perfected version of yourself. It is a process of being shaped — sometimes gently, sometimes less so — by what you encounter along the way.
You do not move from the Fool to the World in a clean, linear progression.
You move through experience.
Through not knowing. Through getting it wrong. Through realising something you thought was solid no longer holds. Through trying again with slightly more awareness than before.
If anything, the journey suggests that confusion and uncertainty are not interruptions to growth. They are part of its structure. I explored this more fully in another piece on the Fool’s Journey and how tarot maps the reality of change.
What becomes clear, when you look at growth through this lens, is that the discomfort you feel is not something to eliminate as quickly as possible.
It is something to understand.
Because the point is not to move through the journey without disruption.
The point is to allow yourself to be changed by it.
The Balance: Growth Without Self-Abandonment
There is a version of this conversation that can easily tip too far in one direction.
If growth is uncomfortable, the logic goes, then perhaps the answer is to push through that discomfort at all costs. To keep stretching, keep destabilising, keep stepping outside your comfort zone, regardless of how it feels.
But not all discomfort is meaningful.
Some discomfort is growth. Some discomfort is misalignment. And some discomfort is simply your system asking you to slow down.
Learning to tell the difference is part of the work.
In my own experience, the earlier years of growth were much more about pushing. Saying yes to things that felt uncertain. Staying in spaces that stretched me. Accepting that I wouldn’t always feel confident or settled.
That phase was necessary. It expanded me.
But over time, I’ve had to learn something else alongside it. How to take care of myself within that process. How to recognise when I am stretching into growth, and when I am overriding my own needs in the name of it.
Because there is a difference between challenging yourself and abandoning yourself.
Growth asks you to move beyond what is familiar. It does not ask you to ignore your limits entirely. It does not require constant discomfort as proof that you are progressing. And it certainly does not demand that you remain in situations that consistently deplete you in order to become a “better” version of yourself.
There is a quieter, more sustainable version of growth that sits alongside the stretching.
It looks like listening as much as pushing. Pausing as much as progressing. Choosing what feels aligned, not just what feels challenging.
Sometimes growth will ask you to step forward even when you feel uncertain.
And sometimes it will ask you to stop.
To rest. To recalibrate. To let what you have already learned settle into something more stable.
I explored this idea of balance and self-trust more in another piece, which might resonate here:
Because the goal is not to become someone who is constantly pushing themselves to the edge.
The goal is to become someone who knows when to stretch and when to soften.
Growth is not meant to feel comfortable all the time.
But neither is it meant to feel like a constant test you are trying to pass.
You are allowed to grow in ways that challenge you.
And you are allowed to care for yourself while you do it.
Ready to go deeper into healing and intentional growth through tarot? Explore The Healing Journey, our step-by-step guided experience for transformation.
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