There is a stretch in the middle of every real change where, by every measure anyone around you is using, nothing is happening. The old thing has stopped. The new thing has not started. You are getting up, and eating, and answering messages a little later than you used to, and if someone asked you what you have been doing you would struggle to give an honest answer that did not sound like an apology.
This is the part that gets misread. Not just by other people — although they misread it energetically, and often out loud — but by the person in it. You start to suspect that the emptiness is a personal failure rather than a stage. That a more capable person would have got through this by now.
What the emptiness is actually doing
An old shape has to come apart before a new one can be made from the same material. That is not a metaphor about butterflies; it is just what happens. You cannot be halfway between two ways of living and also be efficiently productive in either of them, and the attempt to be is what makes this stretch so exhausting.
Most of the advice offered to a person in the middle is really an attempt to get them out of the middle, because the middle is uncomfortable to watch.
The people who helped me most in mine were not the ones with a plan. They were the ones who could sit with me in a thing that had no visible progress and not need me to reassure them that it was going somewhere.
What is worth doing
Very little, deliberately. Keep the ordinary structure — eat, sleep, walk, see one or two people who do not need a report. Say the true sentence to somebody, even if the true sentence is that you do not know what you are doing. Stop measuring the week.
It ends. Not on a schedule, and rarely with an announcement. One day you notice you have started something, and cannot say when the starting began.