The collapse of borrowed meaning
Most people use the word unraveling as though it's automatically bad. But what if some things need to unravel because they were stitched together incorrectly in the first place?
It arrived mid-afternoon.
I was sitting in my balcony chair, watching the sky the way I’ve learned to do when I want my mind to stop performing and start listening. No agenda. No phone. Just the sky doing what the sky does — moving, shifting, becoming something different than it was a moment before.
And then a single word dropped into the quiet.
Unraveling.
Not as a warning. Not as a worry. More like an offering. Like something that had been waiting for me to get still enough to receive it.
I sat with it for a while before I understood what it was trying to tell me.
Most people use the word unraveling as though it’s automatically bad. If a sweater unravels, we’ve lost something. If society unravels, we’ve lost stability. If a marriage unravels, we’ve lost certainty.
But what if some things need to unravel because they were stitched together incorrectly in the first place?
That’s the distinction I think many of us are reaching toward right now.
The unraveling isn’t necessarily destruction. It’s exposure. It’s seeing the threads.
For generations we inherited rules that nobody examined. Work hard. Stay busy. Keep the peace. Respect authority. Put everyone else first. Follow the prescribed path. Many of those rules weren’t evil. Some were useful in their time. But a surprising number were simply assumptions that got passed from one generation to the next without ever being questioned.
Now we’re watching people pull on those threads.
Some are deconstructing their faith. Some are deconstructing work. Some are deconstructing the entire idea of what a meaningful life looks like.
The common denominator isn’t politics or religion or age. It’s the growing unwillingness to outsource our lives to inherited scripts.
That’s why I think so many people feel disoriented right now. The old maps are disappearing faster than the new maps are being drawn.
Humans like certainty. We like knowing where the roads go. We like familiar landmarks. We like being told what comes next.
But the universe doesn’t seem particularly interested in preserving our comfort.
Nature never moves backward. The caterpillar doesn’t become a caterpillar again. The river doesn’t return to its source. Everything is movement. Everything is becoming.
And yet I hear people every day saying some version of: I just want things to go back to the way they were.
I understand the longing. But I don’t think that’s available to us. Nor do I think it would serve us if it were. Because many of the structures now unraveling were already failing large numbers of people. We just couldn’t see it clearly yet.
What we’re witnessing may not be the collapse of meaning.
It may be the collapse of borrowed meaning.
And those are very different things.
I want to stop here and ask you something directly.
Have you felt an uneasiness lately? Not about anything specific necessarily. Just a general sense that the ground under things is shifting. That something you relied on — a belief, a structure, a way of understanding the world — no longer holds quite the way it did.
If you have, I want you to know: that uneasiness is not a sign that something is wrong with you.
It may be a sign that you are paying attention.
The hardest part of an unraveling is that there is always a period where the old structure is gone and the new one hasn’t emerged yet.
That’s where anxiety lives.
But it’s also where freedom lives.
Because once the threads are visible, we finally get to choose which ones belong in the fabric of our lives and which ones never did.
Get comfortable with the unraveling. And for God’s sake, please stop saying you just want things to be like they used to be. Because they never will be. The one thing the universe does not do is go backwards.
Maybe the invitation isn’t to resist the unraveling. Maybe it’s to participate in it consciously.
Are you comfortable acknowledging the unease?
Not explaining it away. Not rushing to fix it. Just sitting with it long enough to ask: what is this trying to show me?
And how do you react when it arrives? Do you reach for the familiar — the old structure, the old certainty, the old map — or do you let yourself stand for a moment in the open space where the new thing hasn’t arrived yet?
Because that open space, uncomfortable as it is, may be exactly where you need to be right now.
What am I still carrying simply because someone handed it to me? What obligations no longer fit? What stories about aging, purpose, or worthiness am I finally willing to examine?
Because perhaps the unraveling isn’t happening to us.
Perhaps it’s happening for us.
And perhaps, years from now, we’ll look back and realize we weren’t watching the world fall apart.
We were watching it shed a skin.
If this piece stirred something in you — if you’ve been feeling that uneasiness and didn’t know what to call it — I’d love for you to bring it to Tuesday.
The Breakthrough Circle is where we sit with exactly this kind of question together. Not to find answers. To get comfortable with the unraveling. To discover which threads belong in the fabric of our lives and which ones never did.
When you become a paid member I’ll send you a personal copy of Building Trust With Yourself — the guide I wrote about learning to consult yourself first, one kernel at a time. Send your email to monica@monirosesoul.com or DM me here on Substack and I’ll send it back personally.
The door is open.