The Other Side of Change by Maya Shankar — Who You Become When Life Makes Other Plans

Maya Shankar knows what it feels like when the plan disappears. As a teenager she was a gifted violinist studying at Juilliard, on track for a performing career, until a tendon injury in her hand ended it. She rebuilt her life around something else, becoming a cognitive scientist and later leading behavioral science work in the White House. Years later, a surrogate pregnancy that ended in miscarriage brought her back to the same question, and this book is her attempt to answer it: when life forces a change you didn't choose, who do you become on the other side? To find out, she turned to people she'd interviewed for her podcast, A Slight Change of Plans, whose lives had been upended by things like a stroke, a prison sentence, a fatal accident, or a frightening diagnosis. Each chapter pairs one of those stories with the research that helps explain how the person got through it. Her argument is hopeful without being naive. Change isn't only something to survive. Handled well, it can reveal parts of yourself you'd never have found otherwise. Why change hits so hard Shankar starts with why even good change is destabilising. It usually brings loss, of the life or identity you had, and uncertainty about what comes next. The uncertainty can be the harder part. Research suggests that waiting for a diagnosis or a decision can be intensely distressing, because the mind keeps generating possible futures. That isn't universal, and genuinely bad news brings its own pain, but it explains why the waiting period can feel worse than people expect. She also explains the "end of history illusion," from a study of more than 19,000 people. We readily admit how much we've changed over the past decade, yet assume we'll change very little in the next one. So when change arrives, it can feel like a violation of who we are, when really it's the normal course of a life. Locked in: when an identity breaks The book's opening story is its hardest. Olivia Lewis was a college senior and athlete when a brainstem stroke left her with locked-in syndrome: fully conscious and thinking clearly, but unable to move almost any part of her body, communicating by blinking. At first she held on to rare stories of dramatic recovery and refused to accept what the stroke might mean. Shankar treats that denial with compassion, as a protective response to the gap between the person you were and the person your circumstances now require, while making clear it can't be the long-term answer. Olivia Lewis's turning point came partly from therapists who treated her with dignity, and partly from letting go of something she hadn't realised was running her life: the need for other people's approval. The lesson Shankar draws is about how identities are built. If your sense of self rests on one role, athlete, executive, caregiver, losing that role can feel like losing yourself. A sturdier identity is anchored in what drives you underneath the role, the values and motives that can find other outlets. Mental spirals: guilt, rumination, and stagnation Some of the most affecting chapters deal with the emotions that keep people stuck. Maryann Gray was driving when her car struck and killed an eight-year-old boy. The accident wasn't her fault, but she carried the guilt for years. Shankar explains that guilt evolved to push us toward repairing harm, and when repair is impossible, it can turn into a loop. Maryann Gray's healing began when she showed another driver in the same situation the compassion she couldn't show herself. She went on to build a support community for people who have accidentally harmed others. Rumination gets careful attention too, because it feels like thinking but isn't. Processing moves you toward a new understanding or a plan, while rumination keeps circling the same ground. Simply trying to push the thoughts away isn't reliable and can make them come back more persistently. What helps is engaging with them differently. One tool is naming the emotion precisely, which research suggests can reduce its intensity. Another is psychological distancing, looking at the situation from someone else's perspective or from a point in the future. The ABC journalist Matt Gutman, stuck replaying a mistake he'd made on air, got unstuck by stepping back and considering how others actually saw it. Shankar also names a state people rarely talk about: stagnation. The crisis has passed and the urgency has faded, but forward movement hasn't come back. Recognising it as its own condition, rather than as laziness or unfinished grief, is the first step out. Possible selves: building the next identity The most practical part of the book is about shaping who you become next. Shankar draws on the psychology of "possible selves," the hoped-for, feared, and expected versions of ourselves that quietly guide our choices. Reginald Dwayne Betts started writing poetry in prison after watching another inmate make the most of his sentence, and went on to become a celebrated poet and lawyer. Shankar suggests using fresh-start moments, breaking a new direction into small steps, and finding people who already support the identity you're growing into. Other stories show different routes. Parents told their unborn daughter would have a serious heart defect found that holding back love to protect themselves didn't protect them from anything. The writer Ingrid Rojas Contreras lost many of her memories after a bicycle accident, and when they returned she found she could reinterpret parts of her past she'd once been ashamed of. She offers three questions to ask after a major change: How might this change what I'm able to do? How might it change what I value? And how might it change how I see myself? They don't assume the answer will be good. They just widen your attention beyond what's been lost. She also brings in attachment research. Our general attachment patterns tend to be fairly stable, but the security we feel in individual relationships can differ and can shift with new experiences, especially when our relationships or circumstances change. The book closes with a "change survival kit," an appendix that gathers more than twenty techniques from the chapters so you can return to them without rereading the stories. What the book gets right, and where hope needs limits This is a reflective book more than a manual. Its strength is the stories, and the tools are woven through them rather than laid out step by step. If you want a structured program, the appendix is where you'll find it. The hopeful frame also deserves a careful reading. The book leans on post-traumatic growth, the finding that many people report becoming stronger, closer to others, or clearer about their values after adversity. That research is real, but much of it relies on people's own looking-back reports of having grown. Studies that measure people before and after a hardship sometimes find much smaller changes, or none in particular areas. Some losses, especially severe trauma, don't resolve into a neat story of growth, and several readers felt the book's tidy arcs didn't leave enough room for that. If you're in the middle of something that hasn't turned out to have an upside, that's not a failure of your mindset. So is it worth reading? Yes. It's a warm, intelligent, and genuinely useful book about one of the hardest things people go through. The stories of Olivia Lewis, Maryann Gray, and Reginald Dwayne Betts stay with you long after you finish, and the science is explained clearly enough to use. The idea of anchoring yourself in what drives you, rather than in the role you've lost, is one of the most practical reframes in this genre. The book can't promise that the other side of change will be better. What it offers is a way to face that uncertainty without assuming the person you were is the only person you could ever be.