The In-Between: On Never Quite Landing — And Learning to Be Okay With That
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I am 47 years old. I have now lived outside my birth country for longer than I ever lived inside it. Do the math, and somewhere in my late twenties, a quiet threshold was crossed — one I didn't notice at the time, but that I feel in my bones every single day.
I belong nowhere. And I belong everywhere. Both of those things are true, and neither of them is comfortable.
It isn't just geography. My brain is wired differently — ADHD, and what I experience as high sensitivity that makes the world louder, brighter, heavier than most people seem to find it. I process things differently. I feel things differently. I present differently. In any room I walk into, something is always slightly off — a conversation I can't quite follow the social rhythm of, a joke that lands two seconds too late for me, an emotional register that everyone else seems to have agreed upon without sending me the memo.
I have started more businesses than I care to count. I have held more jobs than I can list on a résumé without embarrassment. For about fifteen years, the central question of my life was: where do I go, and what do I do when I get there? I moved. I switched. I tried. I failed. I tried again. Not because I was lost exactly — but because I was always, stubbornly, looking for the place that fit.
Here is what I have learned: the fit may not exist. Or rather — I may not be the kind of person who fits.
And slowly, achingly, I am making peace with that.
I work now with people who live in their own versions of the in-between. People who don't know what comes next, who feel the discomfort of a present moment that offers no clear answers, no exit signs, no landing strip in sight. I understand them from the inside. Not because I read about it — but because I have lived it, and in many ways, I still do.
The work — mine, and theirs — comes back to a single, brutal practice: accepting what is. Not what was. Not what might be. What is, right now, in all its uncomfortable, unresolved, in-between-ness.
The poet Andrea Gibson writes about the pull between past and future — and what it costs us to miss the present tense. As the late Andrea Gibson shared with us “ Regret is a time machine to the past. Worry is a time machine to the future. Gratitude is a time machine to the present. No one books my travel for me. I decide where I want to go ”. It stops me every time I read it. Because to me being present isn't peaceful. It is a confrontation. It brings grief. Anger. The particular sadness of releasing a future you were certain was coming.
Presence is not an arrival. It is a practice of letting go — over and over — of the story that somewhere, someday, you will finally land.
Maybe I won't land. Maybe that was never the point.
Maybe the in-between is the life.
And maybe — just maybe — there is something quietly powerful about learning to live there with your eyes open.
