Are You An Inbetweener?

There’s a peculiar stretch of midlife when you know something has ended, but you haven’t the faintest idea what’s replacing it.

Nobody really warns you about this bit.

The weird, wobbly, not-quite-who-you-were-but-definitely-not-yet-who-you’re-becoming bit.

The in-between.

There are endings we recognise because somebody has the decency to mark them for us. Divorce papers arrive. Children leave home. Jobs end. Houses are sold. Birthdays insist on occurring whether we're emotionally prepared for the number attached to them or not.

But identity doesn't operate with quite the same administrative efficiency.

You can leave something long before you've worked out who you are without it.

And that gap is bloody strange.

I know because I've spent quite a lot of time there.

When nothing is particularly wrong.

That's perhaps what makes the in-between difficult to explain.

Life isn't necessarily bad.

Sometimes it's perfectly fine.

You function. You answer messages. You meet people for lunch. You make decisions. You remember to buy toothpaste. From the outside, there may be absolutely nothing suggesting an existential wobble is taking place.

And yet something feels... off.

The old life doesn't quite fit anymore, but the new one hasn't arrived with a convenient floor plan.

You look around and think:

Hang on. Is this it?

Am I supposed to know what happens next?

Does the next chapter come with a bloody table of contents?

Apparently not.

Some days you're clear-headed, capable and rather excited about the possibilities.

Other days you cry at a dog shelter advert and forget the PIN number you've been using for approximately nine years.

I've stood in front of a cash machine while my brain apparently performed a little fuck it dance and hid four numbers in the same mysterious safe place where I've stored countless other things I will never find again.

Midlife is humbling like that.

One minute you're restructuring your entire future.

The next you're staring at a keypad wondering whether you've ever actually had a bank account!

The strange thing about becoming someone new is that, for a while, you don't particularly feel like anyone.

I didn't realise how many things I was leaving at once.

After my divorce, I was single for the first time in my entire adult life.

Really think about that.

Thirty-odd years of sharing space, decisions, responsibilities, routines and identity, and suddenly there was just me.

I'd left the marriage.

But I hadn't yet landed in the life that would replace it.

That's an important distinction.

Because leaving is an action.

Becoming is much slower.

At almost exactly the same time, something similar was happening with work.

I hadn't left corporate yet, but mentally something had already shifted.

There was a growing detachment from a career that had defined an enormous part of my adult life. I could still do the job. I was still capable. Still successful.

I just wasn't entirely convinced I wanted the life attached to being that successful anymore.

That's an awkward place to stand.

When something you've spent years building still looks perfectly respectable from the outside, it can feel almost ungrateful to admit you've stopped wanting it.

So there I was.

Not quite wife.

Not quite the corporate woman I'd been.

Still very much a mother, although that role was changing too.

And without all those labels doing quite as much heavy lifting, I had to confront a surprisingly difficult question.

Who am I when I'm not being useful to everybody else?

I didn't have a neat answer.

I'm not sure I was supposed to.

We underestimate the usefulness of not knowing.

At the time, uncertainty felt like something I needed to solve.

I wanted clarity.

Preferably immediately.

I'm very good with a plan. Give me a complicated exit strategy, finances to organise, decisions to make and moving pieces to coordinate and I'm in my element.

Give me an undefined period of personal transformation with no measurable deliverables and apparently I'm considerably less enthusiastic.

I wanted to know what came next so I could get on with it.

But looking back, I think the not-knowing did something useful.

It stopped me automatically rebuilding what I'd just left.

That's the danger when we're uncomfortable in the middle. We can become so desperate to feel anchored again that we grab the nearest familiar thing and call it the future.

Another relationship.

Another job.

Another role.

Another version of the life we've already had, perhaps with nicer cushions.

Anything to avoid standing in the empty space long enough to discover whether we actually want something different.

I did want something different.

I just couldn't see all of it yet.

And perhaps I needed not to.

The woman in the middle wasn't actually lost.

This is the bit I see differently now.

I wasn't drifting quite as much as I thought I was.

I was making decisions.

Some very deliberate ones.

I planned the hell out of leaving corporate. I made financial decisions that gave me choices. I created The Life Edits. I began experimenting with what work could look like when it wasn't allowed to consume everything else.

I learned what peace felt like.

And that turned out to be rather important, because once you've experienced a quieter nervous system, it's remarkably difficult to persuade yourself that constant pressure is simply what ambition feels like.

I also discovered who I was romantically when I wasn't automatically occupying a role I'd inhabited for decades.

That mattered too.

Because there's a difference between asking, Who will want me now? and asking, Who do I want to be when somebody loves me?

The second question is considerably more interesting.

For perhaps the first time in my adult life, I had enough space to notice myself without immediately adjusting around somebody else's needs.

Not perfectly.

Not permanently.

But enough.

And I think that's what the in-between gave me.

Not answers.

Room.

Sometimes clarity doesn't arrive because you've finally worked everything out. It arrives because you've stopped filling every available space with the life you already know.

The middle isn't particularly photogenic.

We love transformation once it has a before and after.

The bit in between is less marketable.

Nobody particularly wants the photograph where you've left the old thing, haven't found the new thing and are standing there thinking, Well, this is awkward.

But that's where most change actually happens.

Quietly.

You try things.

You change your mind.

You become wildly enthusiastic about an idea on Tuesday and realise by Thursday that you absolutely do not want it.

You worry you've made a mistake.

You experience enormous freedom and then, occasionally, miss the certainty of the very thing you fought to leave.

Contradictory?

Completely.

But that's the middle.

It doesn't require consistency.

And I wish I'd understood that sooner.

Because I spent some of that period thinking I should be further along.

Further towards what, exactly, I couldn't have told you.

Just... further.

There is enormous pressure around midlife reinvention to emerge triumphantly with a new purpose, a new body, a new career, perhaps some excellent linen trousers and a suspicious amount of confidence.

Real life is less cooperative.

Sometimes transformation looks like sitting with the fact that you simply don't know yet.

I'm still an Inbetweener.

Here's the funny part.

I originally wrote about being an Inbetweener as though it were a phase I'd eventually graduate from.

I'm not convinced anymore.

Because every time I think I've arrived somewhere, life shifts again.

The Life Edits has changed.

My relationship with work has changed.

My relationship with love changed.

I've changed.

And I'm fairly certain none of that is finished.

Perhaps we're not supposed to reach some final, polished version of ourselves and stay there.

That sounds exhausting anyway.

Maybe there will always be periods when one version of life has become too small and the next hasn't quite revealed itself.

I'm considerably less frightened of those periods now.

I've seen what can grow there.

Final thought.

If I could go back and speak to the woman standing in that strange space between what had ended and whatever was coming next, I wouldn't give her a plan.

God knows she had enough of those.

I'd tell her to stop treating uncertainty like an emergency.

You don't have to replace every ending immediately.

You don't need to know exactly who you're becoming while you're still letting go of who you've been.

And you certainly don't need to rebuild the past simply because the future hasn't introduced itself yet.

Sometimes the most important thing happening in your life is the thing you can't quite name.

The pause.

The questioning.

The trying on and taking off.

The slightly terrifying absence of a script.

That's not wasted time.

That's where you begin noticing what you actually want.