The In-Between: Where Change Starts
Where you stand between knowing and doing
It is early morning. The coffee is hot, the house is quiet, and the light through the window is that undecided grey before it commits to morning. This is the hour I tell the truth, so here is the first one.
There is a stretch of life that sits between the moment you know something has to change and the moment you actually move on it. It runs between the person you were and the person you are becoming. I have spent most of my life there, in parking lots before a shift and at this kitchen table before dawn. At some point I stopped trying to escape it and started treating it as territory worth mapping.
Here is what makes it so disorienting. You cannot read it from the inside. The waiting that is quietly carrying you somewhere feels almost the same as the waiting that is keeping you stuck. Same weight on the chest, same long nights spent staring at the ceiling. Only one of them is moving you, and it rarely announces which.
The way you find out is not by waiting harder. It is by naming exactly where you stand. Knowing and doing sit further apart than I expected. There is a whole country between them, and I spent years lost in it before I learned that each place you can get stuck has a name.
So I made you a map.
It is called “Write It First: script your way through change, reinvention and the seasons of becoming.” It’s a short field guide to seven positions of the in-between. Each one is a different way of standing between knowing and doing, and each comes with the line that gives it away. You read them slowly, the way you would read a letter from someone who knows you well, and you wait for the one that lands in your chest.
A few of them:
The Gap. I know exactly what I need to do. I have known for a while. I have not done it.
The Grief. Something better arrived, and I am quietly mourning the version that was working.
The Drain. I love this person, and I leave every exchange a little smaller than I arrived.
The Old Script. I am following rules I never agreed to, written by a version of me who no longer runs my life.
One of those will pull harder than the rest, and it will probably be the one you most want to read past quickly. That tug is the tell. The full guide walks you into all seven, the unsexy truth sitting under each, and the single sentence each one asks you to write this week.
Naming where you stand is what turns the waiting that traps you into the waiting that carries you. The position does not change. Your relationship to it does. You stop being lost in the in-between and start moving through it, one sentence at a time.
Your nervous system believes what you write in detail. So the sentence does its quiet work before it is true. You write the line, and the line starts pulling you toward itself. The pen is your permission slip.
“Write It First” is free for paid members of Courage to Create. If you are reading this on the free list and one of those positions found a bruise you had not said out loud to anyone, that ache usually means you are closer to the work than you think. Upgrade your subscription and the guide is yours, along with the monthly workshops where we write our futures in present tense, together.
Write it first. Live it second.
With love,
Magdalena
PS: Which one resonates the most with you? Drop it in the comments below, I read every single one.
