Pacing The Hallway With No Open Doors

Lately, I have been thinking about the restlessness and frustration that comes after you have made a decision, after a shift has happened but the next thing hasn’t shown itself yet. That strange, maddening stretch of time where something in you has moved, but nothing around you has rearranged itself yet to match.

I know that place well because I have lived there.

I knew, with an almost irritating level of certainty, that something inside me had shifted. I could feel it in the way I sat through meetings, the way I scrolled through job listings and opportunities with a kind of detached attention, like I was looking at a menu when I already knew I did not want to eat there. I could feel it in the way I went through entire days performing a version of myself I had already outgrown. I was still there, technically, showing up, producing. Still saying the right things at the right times and hitting the marks and being competent and ambitious and functional, all the things a grown woman with sense is apparently meant to be. But internally, I had already left.

That was the part that unsettled me most. From the outside, everything looked fine. More than fine, actually. My life still looked full, capable, successful in all the ways that photograph well and read nicely on paper. I was doing the job, living in a beautiful city, building things and being me. And yet there was this gap between what my life looked like and where I actually was, and it sat in my chest like a nasty Chardonnay that had gone down wrong and then just decided to linger there out of spite.

The thing is, nobody really tells you that this season does not come with a map. I'd expected clarity to follow the decision, like the next logical step in a process would be right there in front of me, right? You would think it should. You would think that once you know something is over, or too small, or no longer yours, the next thing would appear with some dignity. As a person who is wired to think in sequences, I am an expert at identifying the problem, defining the solution and executing. Lovely in theory and very elegant but unfortunately, this particular in-between season refused the framework.

I had completed step one and I knew what I'd outgrown. What I did not have was step two. When I went hunting for it, searching for the next thing that would make me lean forward the way ambition used to, I found... absolutely nothing. Nothing that sparked or pulled at me. Everything about my career that excited me before was now just disappointingly underwhelming. I browsed and I scrolled and I searched and it just didn't arrive. For someone who had always made a plan and figured out the way, that silence was terrifying.

That is where the anger lived. Not the clean, kind that makes for a good story, but the low and persistent kind that attached itself to random things that didn't deserve it. A slow morning. A colleague's offhand comment. Someone breathing too confidently in my general direction. The anger was never really about any of those things, though. It was the friction of existing in two places at once, one foot in a life that no longer fit and the other hovering over ground I couldn't see yet. My mind had moved and my body hadn't caught up, and the dissonance between the two created this tightness that I carried everywhere without being able to point to its source.

What made it worse was that I am not, by nature, someone who is unfamiliar with movement. I have moved countries, continents and careers. I know how to begin again. History would actually suggest that I am annoyingly good at it. When something no longer fits, I am usually more than capable of building the next thing with a respectable amount of courage, vision, spreadsheets, and at least one beautifully chosen notebook. But that season was different because the next thing hadn't shown itself. I was not trapped in the old shape, exactly. It was more like I had already walked out of it, only to find myself standing in a hallway with no open doors in front of me.

And that hallway did something to me because, all of a sudden, everyone else’s life started looking suspiciously well-timed. Someone got promoted. Someone announced their new relationship with the confidence of a woman who has apparently never once been humbled by uncertainty. A friend was having a baby, another was getting divorced, someone changed careers entirely and posted about it in a tone that suggests reinvention is both linear and moisturised. I knew, logically, that comparison is absurd. That everyone's timeline is their own and that someone else's promotion had nothing to do with my stuck door. I knew this the way I know that the Earth orbits the sun, as a fact that is completely useless at two in the morning when your brain has chosen violence by deciding that everyone else received a map and you somehow missed the distribution email. Logic does not live in that hallway. It visits occasionally, takes a look around, and makes a hasty retreat.

The people in my life couldn't see that I was living in this season at all. They saw someone who was doing well, hitting her stride, living in a beautiful city, building something on the side. And to be fair, all of that was true. But it was also true that I lay awake some nights with a restlessness that had no name, an urgency that had no task, and a grief that felt intensely real for something I had not technically lost yet. I had simply already let go of it internally. It is such a difficult thing to explain to people, because from the outside it can look like dissatisfaction with a perfectly good life. And maybe it was dissatisfaction, but it was the specific kind that belongs to someone who knows she was built for something she can't yet see, and the waiting was making her chest tight and her patience thin and her tolerance for small talk almost nonexistent.

And what I wanted, more than advice, was somewhere to put all this while I was still in it.

That turned out to be harder to find than I expected. The world had a hundred tools for grief, for transitions with clear names and respectable beginnings and endings, for the person who knows where they're going and needs help getting there. There were vision boards and gratitude challenges and a truly staggering amount of journals that wanted me to write a letter to my future self. My future self didn't have an address yet, which made that feel both ambitious and slightly rude. I found containers that gave me 5-step plans and weekly goals, and I bought and used them. But there was no container for the limbo that didn't try to turn it into a project to get to the other side.

I needed somewhere where I could be seen and held while the door was still closed, where it was okay to sit and write “I’m afraid I’m going to be stuck here forever” without immediately being ushered toward the lesson.

So that is why I built Notes for the Quiet In-Between. A journal for the waiting room, or the hallway, or the strange interior no-man’s-land where you're still here but some essential part of you has already shifted. The season where the days are moving but you aren't, or you are moving but the days won't keep up.

Inside, there are no demands or cheerful insistence to write down your top three priorities by Thursday. Instead you will find unfinished fragments and statements. First lines, with the rest left open for you. Like "I'm afraid..." and "for the version of me currently buffering..." because some thoughts do not need to be resolved before they can be written. They just need somewhere to land.

If you are in that hallway right now, these journal pages already exist inside Notes for the Quiet In-Between, our digital journal that’s yours to keep when you join our list. Here, you can bring the anger, the restlessness, the flat and formless nothing that sits where certainty used to be and any other version of you that shows up. Just like my mom’s warmest hugs, you can just be there with no expectation to perform resilience, gratitude, or growth.

When I eventually found my door, it didn't look like anything I had imagined and it certainly took its damn time to reveal itself. You can bet that I was still pacing and wearing the hallway carpet thin when it finally opened. Until your door opens, just know you don't have to stand in the hallway alone.

Wadzi, the daughter behind Stella's Daughter

P.S. If you have something you just need to say somewhere — somewhere that doesn't require you to make it meaningful or wrap it up neatly, the Share Anything corner is here for that. You write it. I read it. Nothing else is required.