What an octopus can teach you about starting over

The science of why slowing down can be the way forward.

The Idea

I didn’t expect silence to be so loud.

When I moved to Sydney I had left a career, a city, and a version of myself. I knew it was the right call, a choice I’d made with both eyes open. I stepped off the plane ready for a fresh start. Genuinely ready. And then, well, nothing happened.

For the first month I let myself settle in. And then, the panic set in.

Omg, what have I done? Did I just make the biggest mistake of my life?

I wasn’t sure, so I did what I always do when things feel uncertain. I defaulted to work. I went on a mission to understand the job market - the landscape, the equivalent title of my previous role, the pay bandings, and where my skills might fit in. I told myself I was taking practical steps, but if I’m honest, I was looking for myself in a job title. And it wasn’t there.

Working in deep tech had given me a lot of purpose and belonging, but now without it, I didn’t quite know who I was.

So I kept moving. Applications, introductions, threads with no replies. I kept showing up every day as if effort alone could fast-forward the process. What I didn’t understand then was that I wasn’t stuck because I wasn’t trying hard enough. I was stuck because I hadn’t yet understood what the pause was actually for.

It took an octopus to explain it to me.

The Science

An octopus has three hearts.

Wait, what? How wasn’t I taught this in school?

Yes, three hearts. Two smaller ones handle the background work of keeping it alive — pushing blood through its gills, ticking away without any effort from the octopus at all. And one main heart that does everything else, things like powering its brain, arms, and decisions.

For most of its life, the octopus moves slowly and deliberately across the seafloor. Swimming is reserved for moments of genuine threat, and every time it does, something has to give. Its main heart stops. Not slows, it actually stops.

The pressure of high-speed movement is so intense that the heart simply cannot beat. The harder it pushes forward, the more its main heart shuts down.

So the octopus does the most logical thing. It walks instead, because walking is the only mode that keeps all three hearts beating. It gives itself the reset it needs before it moves again with any real force.

We are not so different. You cannot run on panic mode and build the next version of yourself at the same time. Something has to slow down first.

Really slow down.

Where It Shows Up

You can feel this in the gaps between chapters in your life, whether you chose them or not.

The months after a relationship ends, before you know who you are without it. The stretch between leaving one job and finding the next one that fits what you want to do next. The quiet after a house move, a sudden loss of a loved one, any decision that was right and still cost something real.

We’re hard on ourselves in these pauses, calling them stalling. We treat them as proof that something is missing — drive, direction, a certainty other people seem to carry easily. We try to force the next thing, and when it doesn’t come we push harder, the way the octopus would if it kept trying to sprint with a heart that had already stopped.

A pause is not the absence of progress. It’s the condition for it.

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling of being stuck is a reset that’s already underway.

About six months into the new start, I sent an email to a contact I’d received from a SXSW mentor. It felt so small against the size of the silence I was sitting in.

I fully expected no response but received a reply immediately. We spoke and she posted my resume out to her network, and Mel Kramer (my hero) grabbed me with both arms. A few days later I interviewed and was offered a role that broke any career ceiling I had reached before.

What followed became Diraq, Subtextt, and moments that slowly started to feel like me again. The next version.

None of it was reachable before the pause had run its course. My main heart had needed the stillness to reset before it could power anything new.

If you’re in a pause right now, let me reassure you that it won’t last forever. The question isn’t how to end it faster, but what you can do inside it to get ready for what comes next.

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