Living in the Space Between Who You Were and Who You Are

Identity doesn’t change like a coat you swap out. There’s always a transition period, a stretch of time where the old version hasn’t fully released and the new version hasn’t fully settled. Most people move through this space quickly, or they don’t notice it at all, or they find it so uncomfortable they rush toward the next firm sense of self.

But there’s something valuable in the in-between, something that opens up when you stop treating it as a problem to solve and start treating it as a place to inhabit.

You have been someone. You know what that felt like, the certainty of it, the way it organized your choices and your relationships and your sense of what mattered. And you are becoming someone else, or perhaps more accurately, you’re becoming a fuller version of yourself. But there’s a gap between the two, and that gap is alive with possibility that hasn’t yet taken form.

Living in this space requires patience, the patience of allowing something to unfold. You don’t force the new self into shape, you don’t cling to the old one out of habit, and you remain present in the uncertainty and trust that clarity will come because it’s already moving toward you.

This is where a lot of growth happens, beneath the surface, in the way you hold things, in the shifts in what draws your attention, and in the small daily choices that are slightly different from what they would have been a year ago. None of it looks like transformation. All of it is.

People sometimes ask if you’re okay during these periods, because from the outside, nothing seems to be changing. And the honest answer is that everything is changing, it’s just changing in a way that doesn’t make noise. You are in transit, and the transit itself, unhurried and unannounced, is one of the quieter forms of becoming that exists.