New Chapters ◦ Chapter One: The Break ◦ Entry 4
By the end of 2024, the logistics were mostly settled. The divorce was finalized. The house was sold. The boys and I were living with my parents. I had left the only career I’d ever known earlier that year. I moved through two jobs that never quite fit before finally landing in one in December that felt steady enough to stay. On paper, life looked contained again.
What surprised me was how little that translated internally.
The life I had known was clearly behind me, but nothing yet felt like it had begun. I wasn’t building anything new. I wasn’t undoing anything either. I was simply existing inside the space between what had closed and whatever might eventually open next.
Some days felt like hovering. Waiting without knowing what, exactly, I was waiting for. Like circling above a runway, waiting for clearance to land in a life that still didn’t quite feel like mine. I didn’t recognize this version of momentum. It wasn’t forward. It wasn’t backward. It was suspended.
That’s when I started thinking of it as the meantime.
Not as a concept, but as a lived reality. The stretch of ordinary days that slowly carry you from who you were toward who you’re becoming, even when you can’t see the direction yet. Where nothing dramatic happens, yet everything still feels unsettled. Where the calendar keeps moving but the internal story doesn’t advance. Where life becomes a series of small obligations instead of direction.
There were no breakthroughs in this season. No clarity. No dramatic shifts. Just grocery lists, school schedules, workdays, messes to clean up, and the steady repetition of getting through what needed to be done.
I used to believe that if nothing visible was changing, then nothing meaningful was happening. That stillness meant stagnation. That waiting meant wasting time. But living inside this stretch forced me to reconsider that assumption. Not every season is meant for movement. Some are meant for stillness. For survival. For waiting long enough to hear your own thoughts again. For letting the nervous system settle after too much change too fast.
I was waiting for the next chapter to reveal itself, without any idea when or how that might happen. In the meantime, I fetched snacks. I refilled prescriptions. I answered emails, paid bills, went to work, and moved through days that looked almost normal from the outside. Occasionally I laughed. Occasionally I didn’t. Most of the time, I simply kept the machinery of daily life running.
I wasn’t rebuilding yet. I wasn’t reinventing myself. I wasn’t reaching toward anything new. I was learning how to exist inside a life that no longer resembled the one I had planned, without yet knowing what would replace it.
The story didn’t feel finished. But it didn’t feel like it had begun again either.
I was still between the chapters.
This post is part of my New Chapters series — personal essays about rebuilding, resilience, and writing what comes next. Visit the New Chapters landing page to explore the full series and read it in order.
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