There’s a particular kind of ache in standing in the doorway between two rooms. You’re neither here nor there. The ground beneath you feels unsteady, like it might give way if you stay too long.

When it comes to relationships, this in-between place is its own kind of vertigo. The pieces of your life that once fit—your routines, your roles, even the way you love—start to feel off. But what comes next? That part is still blurry.

And sometimes, this limbo lasts for years.

I think about Janice. When we first met, she’d been standing in the doorway for seven years. On paper, she was married. In reality, she’d quietly checked out somewhere between the birth of her second child and her promotion to senior management. Not gone enough to leave, not present enough to fully stay. Just… suspended.

“Everyone keeps asking what I’m going to do,” she told me once, her hands wrapped around a coffee mug like it might tether her to something solid. “But I genuinely don’t know. Is that allowed? To just not know for a while?”

We should talk more about this part—the messy, unresolved middle. The part where you start to undo the old patterns but don’t yet have new ones to hold onto.

Beginnings are punctuated. The moment you realize something’s got to change. The lightbulb moment. The breaking point

Endings are glorified. 

I finally left and found myself.
We worked hard and came out stronger.
I set a boundary and everything shifted.

But what about the middle? The long stretch where you’re still figuring it out? That’s the part we’re supposed to rush through, minimize, or keep to ourselves.

The middle is where most of us actually live.

Where you recognize that your people-pleasing is slowly eroding your marriage—but you haven’t yet found the courage to speak without your throat tightening.

Where it clicks that your controlling tendencies are evidence of old abandonment wounds —but trying to tolerate uncertainty still makes your nervous system scream.

You know the what, but not the how. 

There’s no roadmap for this kind of terrain.

Just leave him already.
You need to make a decision.
You can’t stay stuck forever.

The voices of well-meaning friends who don’t really get it. The internal pressure to just decide already. The low hum of shame for still being here. Feeling like you should have moved through and on by now.

Permute, 2025 by Stacey Herrera

Change doesn’t flip like a light switch. Real change happens in tiny, imperceptible shifts—small tectonic movements that, over time, reshape entire landscapes.

I think about Janice again. 

Three years after that conversation, she finally made a decision. Not in some dramatic overnight revelation, but in thousands of quiet moments where she slowly learned to hear herself beneath the noise. Where she built the capacity to sit with discomfort instead of scrambling to fix it. Where she realized that uncertainty, while deeply uncomfortable, wasn’t actually dangerous.

This is the labor of transformation. The unseen work that happens when no one is watching.

The middle doesn’t make the highlight reel on IG feeds. 

It doesn’t fit into a “How I Changed My Life” post. 

It lives in the in between—pauses in conversations, long drives where you let yourself feel the thing you’re running from, quiet hours where you question it all but keep going anyway.

If you’re here, in the middle, know this— your timeline is your own. 

No one is standing in your particular doorway. No one else carries the weight of your choices.

Stay here long enough for the questions to ripen and bear fruit. Don’t try to force the answers before they’re ready.

Whatever comes next—whether it’s rebuilding, burning it all down to the studs, or something you haven’t yet imagined —will be yours—but you must fully inhabit this space first.

The middle isn’t a waste of time. It’s where the story blooms and unfolds.

xo,

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