The In Between

I feel like I’m stuck between chapters or honestly, like the book hasn’t even started yet. An endless prologue that will get cut for time when the real story gets going.

For the first time in my life, I don’t have a direction. A dream, a vision.

I feel like I’m stuck in limbo.

When I was a teenager, my soul was encompassed with one single mission; get out of this town. I really didn’t care where it landed me, I just knew there had to be more out there. A life not overrun with 8 lane highways, identical houses as far as the eye can see, crime and noise and chain restaurants. A life that requires you to be tough and hardened to keep you safe. Perpetual anxiety in the form of a human body.

I moved to Spain, then Florida, then New York, then Wyoming. I moved and moved and moved and I’ve never looked back.

When I was in college, I spent every free second in pursuit of becoming a dietitian. I completed two degrees at once, an internship, a waitressing job, two seasons a year on the club lacrosse team, and fostered 11 dogs. Every morsel of my energy spent to get the opportunity to help others dissipated by the burnout that filled my body before I even signed my license.

My life in Idaho was full of the chase. Looking for the perfect house to start our lives in, the property to build on, the trail we’d get married on, the dog we’d parent together, what the rest of my 20’s would be full of. Until the facade of happiness shattered.

Every move had a draw. A push in my soul to find the next thing, the better fit. Until I landed here. In Durango.

Next fall marking three years of creating community and learning these mountains and being somewhere long enough to establish traditions for the first time. My favorite coffee shops and the yearly weekend trips down the same paths that feel like home.

I first parked my car here just freshly stitched together. A year in Salt Lake prior, picking myself up off the ground, a crumbled human learning to operate outside the confines of an abusive relationship. On the brink of a fresh start.

And I got just that. A fresh start that molded and shaped the mud of my soul into solid earth. The stitches are out, the scars just lightly visible. I’m good. Happy, satisfied, loved, fulfilled, and proud. My business is booming. I’m writing freely and easily. I pay a therapist once a week to help me continue to evolve, not because I need to, but because I want to grow. Despite my spotify daylist generating titles like “sad girl crying bed rotting saturday morning” and “yearning wistful monday afternoon”, I’m happier than I’ve ever been.

For two years, I grappled with the staying. Loosening my grip on the constant movement I found in my earlier 20’s. Eleven moves in 7 years, never happy or settled, always dreaming of the next. I started to dream of what the foreseeable future of my life would look like here. How I would plant my garden and where I would bathe in the rivers. The laughter I would have with my friends at the wooden table I picked up from facebook marketplace last summer and the spaces where I might fall in love again.

But then I moved and that was tossed into the void. Tumbling down the San Juans with whatever plan I had. Despite not much changing overall (I still have my business and a lovely rental on the other side of town and the same wonderful friends), that dream feels like I slipped from sleep too soon, impossible to grasp onto no matter how hard I try. The garden can’t be cultivated and I’m considering selling that table before I go hike the PCT.

The past 6 months have felt like a long transition into the unknown. I feel this huge change on the horizon, a big shift, but I still don’t have one single clue as to what that is. What I want it to be. Everything is steady and stable and a part of me feels like I could sit here forever but I know that I can’t. That I don’t want to. That if I did I would be stuck in the temporary.

Everyone around me is getting married, starting new jobs, having babies, moving in with their partners or into their own places and here I stand.

Logically, I know I’m changing too. My business is growing and evolving along with me. I’ve got more opportunities and passions and a strong sense of who I am. But I can’t shake this feeling despite all that has happened, I’m in the prologue and I’m terrified I will never get out.

I’m scared everything is changing but I’m afraid nothing will.

My therapist tells me I need to sit with the feeling to heal the disconnect between the fear in my heart and the logic in my mind. How can I be so motivated with an ever-growing list of goals and projects and still feel lost? untethered? off track?

Like I’m getting left behind as my community steps into their next chapters.

Just standing on the platform watching as the train chugs along. Feet cemented in place. Unable to chase down the track and grab on to the railing of the caboose.

Unwilling to chase.

And this conflict causes my heart to twist. Yes, with tenderness and grief for all the girl I was went through to get me here. A place of joy I could have never envisioned and still I am left yearning.

Grieving but also full of disgust that potentially, my brain feels like a book is only worth writing if it is about partnership, motherhood, or home ownership. That my story doesn’t matter if there’s not someone down on their knee in front of me, twirling me around in a circle and telling me they’ll never let me go. That my story won’t start till there’s a seed growing in my stomach pushing me into parenthood.

So I’m left questioning. If I’m not willing to chase, or maybe more accurately, don’t feel like chasing is right for me,

what does maturing look like without that?

If I never find a life partner, if I never decide to have a child, will my community hold me equally? Or will I feel infantilized by their “adulthood”?

How can my story be in my control?

Can I start the next chapter with internal change instead of external?

Do I need to resort to the dramatics of my past to find my future?

A traumatic break up, a quick decision to pack into my car and move yet again, to quit a job and start another and quit again, burning it all down in the name of forward progress.

The impulsive shove into the new.

While I am working on being open to love and partnership, I don’t want to live my life in the waiting room just looking around for a person but I don’t know how to move out of this space and onto the next.

How do I start to envision the rest of my life? How do I decided if I want to move again? To buy a house in Durango? Or Mancos? Or back in the Sawtooths? or maybe Montana? How do I decided if I need to move on to move forward or if staying is a level of growth I’ve yet to experience when for the first time ever, my heart isn’t screaming that it’s time to go?

How do I sit in the uncomfortable and let life unfold?

The fear and anxiety well up and overtake my soul but I know now that that’s a strong indicator that I care. Deeply. That I want happiness and joy and excitement and I care enough to pursue it, even if I’m not sure how yet.

This change is a slow burn and I’m trying to find excitement in the fact that I feel everything is about to change and hopefully at the same time, not that much will. That there is a mystery at my feet waiting to unfold when the time is right.

Hopefully my community is still sitting right here, full of connections I cherish deeply. Hopefully I can feel like I’m on the train even if our destinations aren’t the same. Hopefully I can continue to feel excited and empowered in my business and work. and hopefully regardless of any of that, I will still feel happy.

I don’t know where this will take me but I know in 6 weeks, I’ll pack up my things for 1600 miles on trail and whether I’m ready or not, I’ll be stepping out of the waiting room and into the first chapter of the second volume of my life.

For now, my only job is to sit and let the unknown swirl around me and try to not get lost in the spiral.