Week 6. In Between

Do you know that feeling when you‘re stuck in between life stages, for example, when you‘re not a kid, but not yet an adult; when you‘re starting a new lifestyle habit, let’s say a home workout and you don‘t feel any different yet, you don‘t see any results and are not sure if it‘s doing anything for you? Or another interesting one, when you have symptoms of something but when you go to see a doctor they tell you that the thing you have is still not developed yet to be a problem, the numbers are not yet in the zone of danger so they pronounce you „not sick“, doesn‘t matter that you definitely don‘t feel well, much less healthy. That „in between“ stage is awfully awkward to be in, there‘s not much to do, just to be and being is terribly uncomfortable, nerve wrecking and no matter what you do does not push the situation to change in any direction. It‘s like hanging on a thread and knowing it‘s going to break at any moment but you can‘t make it break faster or make it last longer, the only thing to do is to be and to wait for chips to fall as they may. For humans, who value clarity, familiarity, orientation to action, situations like these cause so much discomfort, stress, and overthinking. But maybe these situations come into our lives for us to stop and re-evaluate the way we‘ve been living, to re-examine everything that lead to this and to collect the lessons, the golden nuggets that we missed from past experiences. If we don‘t look back to gather wisdom, life has a way of making us stop and do that in the most inconvenient times and ways. Sometimes even when we do make stock and gather the lessons learned, we still need to look one last time, to dig even deeper than we ever have to uncover the last bit, last piece of the puzzle we‘ve been working on in our lives. It’s uncomfortable, it’s messy, sometimes extremely painful, but it does come for a reason. Life is not there to torture us, it’s there to teach us.

I wish I could tell you that I have a tip on how to get through this faster, that I have the strategy, the way to go around it but I don’t. And it’s not about that at all. These situations happen in life to shake us, to unearth what we know and think about life and ourselves for the purpose of opening us up for new things, sometimes the things we never could have imagined existed or possible. For the things we could not possibly see through our old-self lense. So even though it sucks not to have a stable ground or clear direction, if life brought this, it was necessary and we need to go THROUGH (that’s the key word here) this situation at this time. The only advice I could give to someone going through the „in between“ stage is to not do it alone. If there‘s someone by your side you can confide in, that‘s already a lighter load to carry. For both of you, since sometimes seeing someone struggling and not knowing how to be there for them or to help is also a huge struggle for others. So yes, sharing is caring.

Have an insightful week.