The In-between

There is a season of becoming that does not come with clarity or confidence. It comes with pauses, sighs and a strange sense of disorientation. You wake up one day and realize you no longer fit inside the life you’ve been living, but you also can’t yet see what comes next. This is where I am now – somewhere between leaving and arriving.

I am not just grieving the end of my marriage. I am grieving the version of myself that stayed too long. The one who tried. The one who thought love had to be earned. The one who believed that if she just became a little smaller, quieter, and more accommodating, perhaps then she would be accepted and loved, chosen. This in-between space is about honoring her and releasing her. It is a space that has a constant low hum in my body, a long exhale that hasn’t quite finished yet. A restlessness that doesn’t know how to be moved. I am not who I was, but I am not yet who I am becoming. I’ve had to learn to sit inside of this space without rushing to explain, to justify or to solve.

I keep wanting to rush myself out of this space, to treat it like a problem that needs to be solved. To label it healing or growth or moving on – something productive, something with a clean break and closure.

The truth is much quieter than that. The space isn’t asking me to become anybody yet. It’s asking me to stay, to listen and to release without knowing what will replace that which is leaving. It is the most uncomfortable space I have ever lived. It is a space I have worked my entire life to avoid, if I am to be completely honest.

When one relationship ended, I quickly found another to replace. I lived in a victim loop rather than choosing to ask the very difficult question, “how did I get here?”, “how did I contribute to this mess?”. It was easier to blame the other person’s toxicity without addressing my own.

The result of that was a band-aid that wouldn’t stick and eventually ended in the same disaster. I again asked myself, how did I get here only to blame him for all of his toxic behavior. I found another band-aid and the loop went on.

I couldn’t be alone but I also refused to address that in a way that would solve the underlying issue. The most difficult part of living in this loop is that logically, I knew what needed to be done. I could see the same patterns in friends and name it. Hell, I could name the loop I was living….but I would not dig deep enough to address the driving forces behind it.

Something happened with my marriage. I remember the day that I realized this man was emotionally unavailable and I remember following up with the question, “how did I get here AGAIN?”, instead of falling into the victim rabbit hole I caught a very quiet voice asking, “are YOU emotionally available?”. Then, I started looking at all of his behaviors, all of our arguments, as mirrors - something shifted. Rather than blaming him, I started doing the deep internal work that had been trying to be done for so many years. It was slow, it was steady but it was effective and it was painful.

I started to allow myself to feel everything that came up. Sometimes it was anger, sometimes it was grief, sometimes it was elation and excitement. I cried, A LOT and often. I started moving my body when it asked to be moved and in the ways that it was asking to be moved – which was never high intensity, always flow movements like dancing or yoga.

My body asked to be moved in the most undefined, unlabeled ways. The more I obliged, the more I released those emotions and would move to the next level. It was not a quick process and it was not meant to be quick. It was meant to be slow and steady…it was meant to be noticed and felt.

I am still going through all of it. I still have waves of grief and profound sadness. It is a lonely space to be…but I have never allowed myself to be lonely and to heal deeply. While the in between is difficult and often times too quiet for my busy mind, it is exactly what I need right now.

I don’t know yet what comes after this. I only know that I am here, and that this space is doing something to me that I can’t rush nor name. Maybe this isn’t the part where clarity arrives. Maybe it’s the part where I stop asking it to. For now, I am letting myself remain in the in-between - - the unfinished, unannounced, and still becoming.