Which space in your life has never been designed?

Letters from the in-between, No. 17

A letter on the spaces you create long before you ever stand in them.

Every house starts with a deep hole. Before the concrete, before the framing, before anyone argues about where the windows should go, a machine arrives and takes out what was already there. That part is loud and ugly and produces nothing you would ever photograph. It is also the only reason the rest of it holds.

Three years ago I re-started writing. It began in a hospital room with James. He looked at me and asked, “Mom, am I going to die?” There was nowhere in that building to put what that question did to me. So it went on paper, because a notebook was the only thing in reach that could hold it.

I wrote in the waiting room. Those rooms are always cold, and the antiseptic smell gets into your coat and stays there for days after you go home, and next to my hand there was a cup of bad hospital coffee going cold because I kept forgetting it was there. I filled pages in that chair. Nobody looked at me twice, because a woman writing in a hospital waiting room looks like a woman filling out forms.

Some mornings I wrote the same paragraph I had written the week before. It felt like proof I was going nowhere. It was what digging looks like when the ground is that hard.

Nothing got built that season. The digging was the work.

James is flourishing now. He is back to sports, competitions, public speaking and the “normal” things that teens do; and the notebook from that month is in a box I do not open often.

Where the footings go

The writing changed when the hole stopped getting deeper. The question underneath it got quieter and much less dramatic: what am I designing, who am I, who am I becoming.

Those three questions are footings. Nobody walks a friend through a new house and stops at the foundation. You take people to the kitchen. But everything you will ever stand on rests on that pour, and if it is uneven you spend the next decade wondering why the doors do not close properly in a house that photographs beautifully.

I had built on uneven ground before. Fifteen years at General Motors, walking out in 2019 to start my coaching and consulting business. Montessori schools, which I started running that same fall. Every one of those was a real structure and some of them were beautiful, and I put each one up without ever writing down who was going to live inside.

So this time I wrote the footings first. Present tense, in detail, most of it un-shareable. Months of it. Your nervous system believes what you write in detail, and detail is the whole cost of admission.

Then I got to frame the spaces

Once the foundation held, the writing turned into design.

I drew a space for community before there was anyone in it, and you are standing in it right now. Then I drew a space for time, and that one took the longest, because I had spent my whole adult life at the bottom of my own list. Not off it. On it, at the bottom, underneath the work and the family and everyone else’s priorities, in the place where you put the things you get to if anything is left.

I had tried the systems. Time-blocking, the twelve-week year, Franklin planners, three-hour focus blocks I never once sustained. Some of it helped for a while. None of it stuck. Every one of those was built by somebody else, for somebody else’s brain, in somebody else’s season of life, and each time one failed I concluded that I had.

The thing I was actually looking at was a question about who I am when nobody needs anything from me, and I had never once answered it in writing. So I drew that space. What the hours are for. What I am allowed to do with an unclaimed one. Who I am when I stop racing time and start living inside it. Permission to move from the bottom of the list to the top does not arrive from an app. It gets written with a pen.

Then I drew a space for money. I inherited a whole set of opinions about money and had never once chosen my own.

The sentence I grew up inside was that we did not have enough money. It was not said once. It was said the way people say the weather, and it was said with the emphasis on enough. By Polish standards we were middle class. From the outside we were considered well off. Inside the house there was never enough, and both of those things were true at the same time, which is how a sentence like that survives without anyone ever testing it.

I packed that sentence at twenty one along with everything else I brought over, and I ran an entire adult life on it without once checking whether it still described anything.

It is a strange thing to find out in midlife, that you have been running an entire area of your life on somebody else’s settings and calling it a personality. So I drew that space too. What money is for. What I allow it to mean about me. Who I am standing in it.

I get to move the walls

This is the part I did not expect, and I would not have believed it when I was still standing in the hole.

A space I write can be moved. If it stops working, or if I outgrow it, I take the wall down and put it somewhere else, and the cost is another morning and another page.

I outgrew the corporate space and rebuilt it. I outgrew the version of the work space I framed in the fall of 2019, the one with the schools were in.

Then I framed something I had never built anything like before. The Courage to Create Academy was a description on a page for seven months before it was anywhere else, and the spaces inside it are the ones I have just walked you through, because they were the spaces of my life first.

Seven months is a long stretch of ordinary weeks in which the thing is not finished and nobody is waiting for it.

What it looked like was mornings. Up before the house, before the street, before anyone in the world had asked me for anything. That hour is not inspiring. It is dark and it is quiet and it is the same every single time, and on most of those mornings the entire output was one section of one workbook. That is what building an academy looks like from the inside, and it never once felt like progress.

The Academy is made out of those mornings and nothing else. It is open now. People work inside it. It was a sentence in a notebook before it was anything anyone could walk into. I am proud of this house. I do not say that easily, and it took me until my fifties to say it out loud without immediately qualifying it.

What you are designing?

You are already doing this. You are designing something right now, in a notebook or in your head at two in the morning, and the only real question is whether you are doing it on purpose.

Draw or script it this week. One page. The space, the light in it, who you are inside it, what happens there. Do not build anything yet.

Write it first. Live it second.

With love from the in-between,

Magdalena

P.S. Tell me in the comments which space you are drawing. I read every one. And if you want to draw or script with me, and the community join the Courage to Create Academy.

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