The Uncomfortable Middle
I graduated high school with no idea what to do with myself.
Everyone else seemed to have a direction, or at least some semblance of an idea of what they wanted to do. I had vague ideas and a handful of options that all felt like they didn’t belong to me. I told myself I just needed time to figure it out. That’s what you say when you have no idea what you’re doing.
I wanted to go to art school in Chicago, or at least I did a couple years after graduation, but I talked myself out of it. Not in one dramatic decision, but in a series of small, reasonable-sounding ones. It wasn’t practical. I’m not really artsy. How would I support myself? I didn’t want to teach art. Each thought felt like common sense at the time. Looking back, it was something else entirely.
So instead of choosing a life direction, I moved away from one…repeatedly. A new city feels like your making a decision. It has boxes and an address and a story you can tell your friends. Nobody asks whether you’re moving toward something or just moving. Including you.
And then I clung to someone and called it love. It had the shape and look of love. It filled the uncomfortable space where a self was supposed to be forming, and when something fills that space, you stop noticing the space is there. I confused love for the relief of not having to become anyone yet.
None of this felt like the same thing while it was happening. It felt like separate chapters. A confused year, or five. A practical choice. A fresh start. A loving relationship. Different decades, different cities, different disguises.
There is a lenth of time in every transition where your old life is gone and the new one hasn’t formed yet. Where you’ve ended something, or something has ended, and who you’re becoming isn’t there yet, its still coming into focus. It’s supposed to be a passage. You’re supposed to move through it.
I didn’t know anything about this, so I didn’t know I was in it. And when you don’t know you’re in the middle, you explain the discomfort some other way. You decide you’re unmotivated and lack disipline. You build yourself around avoiding these uncomfortable feelings.
I did that for most of my life. I kept mistaking the middle for who I was.
Every time I stood in that uncomfortable middle place, I reached for the fastest thing that would make the feeling stop. A move. A person. A practical decision that closed the question before I had to answer it. The discomfort ended, briefly. So did becoming who I was meant to be. Whatever was trying to take shape in me got shelved for another decade, and I just thought it was life happening.
I never fully got to me.
I’m the closest now.
That unformed middle stretch is a real place. Every transition has it, the space after something ends and before the new thing takes hold. Feeling unsettled there isn’t a flaw in you. It’s what becoming feels like. The trouble starts when you don’t know it exits, and you spend years treating a location like a character defect and something to be avoided.
If some version of this feels like where you are, one question worth considering: Do you feel like you haven’t caught up to your life yet, or does staying unsettled make something easier? Don’t rush the answer. It changes what you need next.
I wrote a free guide about why this cycle keeps repeating, called Why You Keep Starting Over. It’s at the link in my profile if the middle sounds like somewhere you’ve been living too.