The Great In-Between: Stories from the messy middle of becoming

I’d been living in a New York minute for 21 years, chasing subways, promotions, late-night parties and some invisible finish line that never arrived. I was depleted, and the usual levers I pulled to power through weren’t working anymore. I thought a week alone in a cozy yurt, wrapped in the northern New England woods with nothing to do beyond keeping the fire blazing, might be the reset I needed. I lay on the floor atop a cushy hide blanket, staring up at the skylight watching the clouds pass. In that moment, I had everything I needed, which wasn’t much, a sharp contrast to the life I’d curated in the city. I found myself daydreaming of a farmhouse with a vegetable garden, maybe even a yurt of my own. And suddenly a thought I’d long ago filed under the idea of failure surfaced: Was there a life waiting for me outside of the identity I’d built in New York City? I asked this out loud to no one, and let it be true.

Eight months after that week in the yurt, I left New York City. Six months later, I left my career. A month after that, I booked a one-way flight to Ecuador. I told people I was going on an adventure, but really, I was determined not to come back. Starting a new life in a foreign country seemed like the best narrative to mask the internal collapse I found myself in. Instead, I’d fly away and call it freedom. 

I landed in Montañita, a surf town on Ecuador’s Pacific coast, known for great waves and a good time. Everything I thought I wanted was there: an extended tropical stay and a blank calendar with nowhere to be and no looming return to the grind. Physically, I was in paradise, but my mind wouldn’t loosen its grip on answers I didn’t have and didn’t know how to find. So I kept busy the only way I knew how, by overindulging in everything.

After a massage with a local healer, as I was slowly coming out of a transcendental state, she came and stood beside me. “I have a message for you,” she said. She leaned in and whispered one word so close to my ear my whole body shivered: “Surrender.” Tears began to flow as the word pressed down, huge and undeniable, like an elephant on my chest.

I had no idea how to begin to let go after carefully cultivating a life of control, my protection, my armor. As a kid, I was told I was too much: too tender, too combative, too many emotions. So I built armor that read as a difficult child, and I carried that label until it became true. By the time I was grown, it wasn’t something I wore, it was part of me. But the armor had become too heavy to fight in, and too tight to live inside. 

By the time I reached the retreat center in the Bolivian Amazon, I’d been traveling for seven months. My mind was crowded with questions I couldn’t name, and my body was spent from searching everywhere but inward. The jungle was a reprieve, indifferent to my urgency and very clear about its terms. Step carefully. Pay attention. Move with respect. We entered an eight-day dieta of oats and suggested silence, in preparation for four ayahuasca ceremonies.

The medicine went for my body first. Pain moved in relentless waves, untangling knots I didn’t know were there, loosening the child-built armor that no longer protected me. I left the jungle still aching for answers, but with a newfound reverence for my body’s capacity to hold and release so much pain.

My travels continued as I migrated to a homestead in Turkey built by women who had turned a mountain of soil into a home with their bare hands. I let their strength and the groundedness of the land seep into me, until I had the courage to admit I couldn’t go on like this. I cancelled my travel and called my father and stepmother. “Can I come and stay with you for a little while?”

The emotional whiplash of returning to the place I’d only ever dreamed of leaving was unmooring. Some mornings I jumped out of bed, sure clarity was around the corner. Others I’d drop into hopelessness with sobs loud and raw, collapsing on the kitchen floor while my dad stood nearby. He gave me space to sit with my pain without pulling me out of it, his presence itself a lesson: real love doesn’t fix, it witnesses.

I found myself wondering how I’d gone so far only to end up exactly where I started. Gratitude tangled with frustration and relief blurred with regret. I was no longer a New Yorker, no longer a woman who could measure her worth through output and titles, no longer a traveler, no attachment to anyone or anywhere. If I wasn’t any of those things, then who was I?

I spent hours every day in the woods and along the ocean, letting the land set the pace. Slowly, my nervous system began to soften; I could drop out of my head and back into my body, feel the ground under my feet, and remember I was safe. In the way the waves kept returning to shore and the pines kept standing guard, I found a rhythm and experienced that full body “yes”,  letting me know I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

And that’s when he came into view, not new but newly visible after circling each other for a decade. When he re-entered my orbit, it felt like a click, as if our lives had been aligning to the same frequency and the universe had finally dropped us in front of each other, ready for the next chapter. He fit perfectly into the story, and now, right on cue, the partner I’d been calling in had arrived.

I fell for the story harder than I fell for him. He set the rhythm and rules of our long-distance relationship, and I told myself the longing for more laughter and connection would naturally evolve, so I bent myself around his limits and called it compromise. Friends cheered us on, synchronicities stacked up, and I let those external nods of affirmation drown out the persistent no in my body. Underneath the story I was diligently creating, my nervous system was running an old script. I was still organizing myself around being “too much,” still chasing regulation in someone who wasn’t regulated themself, so cut off from their own heart they couldn’t possibly meet mine. 

I was weeks away from packing up my life in the place I’d fallen in love, my safe space, my home to move away to his. My chest tightened every time I tried to picture us living together. I began waking up night after night, ripped out of sleep by panic, my heart hammering, my body flushed with heat. My gut twisted with every conversation I held back with fear of disappointing him, and still I kept rearranging the facts to protect the fantasy.

The call lasted three minutes. His voice was cold and robotic, as if we were closing out a contract instead of a future. There was no conversation, just a clean slice. “I’m out.” And just like that, he was gone. A relief settled over me before my ego sprinted in with its oldest script. See, it said, everybody leaves. You trusted someone instead of your own body, and they took it all away.

My father sat beside me as I rocked back and forth in loud sobs, while  another truth slipped in. I was surrounded by people who loved me. I was, in fact, the farthest from alone I had ever been.

This wasn’t the universe punishing me; it was pulling me out of something my body already knew wasn’t safe. My time in the great in-between had been training me for this. Surrender isn’t a pretty mantra. It’s trusting that when something is stripped away, it’s for my protection and that the point was never a story tied up in a perfect bow, but a life built on trusting my own knowing.

This essay is a brief excerpt from The Great In-Between, a writing project in the works about the liminal, messy middle of an identity in transition.