In The Space Between Who I Was and Who I’m Becoming

There’s a particular stretch of time that doesn’t announce itself very clearly. It arrives quietly, often after something has ended, but before anything new has taken shape. Life isn’t asking for answers yet. It isn’t even asking for decisions. It’s simply asking you to notice where you are.

That’s where I find myself now.

Not who I once was, and not yet who I’m becoming — but somewhere in between, standing on ground that still feels tender underfoot. I can feel the outlines of what’s no longer true, even as the next shape hasn’t fully revealed itself. For a long time, I thought this was a place to move through quickly. Now I’m beginning to understand it as a place worth staying with.

When I slow down enough to look honestly at my life, instead of rushing through it, patterns start to appear — not as neat lessons, but as threads that have been weaving themselves through me for years. I’m learning to see through a different lens, to notice what my life has already taught me—and how those lessons might be the very foundation of what comes next.

I’ve often felt slightly out of step with the environments I found myself in, like I was angled just a few degrees differently than what was expected. It wasn’t dramatic, just persistent. A sense that fitting in required a kind of shrinking I couldn’t sustain for very long. Over time, that friction taught me something I didn’t have language for then: that belonging loses its meaning the moment it asks you to abandon yourself.

There were other seasons too — times when I shaped myself around what was needed of me. I learned how to be capable, reliable, composed. I learned how to perform strength convincingly. What I didn’t realise at the time was how exhausting it is to live from borrowed identities or how lonely it can feel to be surrounded by people while quietly disappearing inside yourself.

Some of the structures I once relied on didn’t last. Relationships shifted. Versions of home dissolved. The future I thought I was building rearranged itself without asking for permission. At first, that kind of change felt destabilising. Later, it became familiar. I learned how to rebuild, not because I wanted to, but because life required it. And in doing so, change lost some of its power to frighten me.

There were also long stretches where nothing obvious seemed to be happening at all. Quieter years. Inward years. Growth that didn’t translate well into updates or milestones. Looking back, I can see how much was taking shape beneath the surface — how stillness can be deeply active, how foundations are laid in the dark.

My heart, too, had its seasons of closing. There were moments when survival felt more accessible than softness, when self-protection made more sense than openness. I don’t regret those choices. They were intelligent responses to where I was. But I can see now that armour, while useful, eventually becomes heavy. Letting myself open again hasn’t been about returning to who I was before — it’s been about learning how to move forward with tenderness intact.

For a long time, I believed I needed clarity before I could speak. Answers before I could share. A sense of arrival before I could trust myself to move. What life has shown me instead is that clarity often follows motion, not the other way around. That curiosity can carry us further than certainty ever does.

I don’t have a polished plan for what comes next. No cinematic moment of arrival. What I do have is a body of lived experience — proof that I know how to return to myself, how to stay open while changing, how to create from something real rather than perform something finished.

This season — this middle ground — doesn’t feel like a pause anymore. It feels like preparation. A quiet recalibration. Roots strengthening before whatever rises next.

I used to think purpose lived in certainty. Now I’m beginning to suspect it lives here instead — in the movement, in the shaping, in the willingness to remain present while becoming.

And for now, that feels like enough.

Rhi xx