The Quieting

It didn’t arrive like a door opening.
More like a window,
already open,
and me finally noticing the air.

Something in me grew quiet.
Not peaceful at first.
Just quiet,
the way a room goes still
after a sound you didn’t know was constant
finally stops.

The silence wasn’t empty.
It was the first honest thing
I had felt in years.
And I could not
unfeel it.

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Never About You

I stopped taking everything personally.
That sentence sounds small.
It isn’t.

It’s the moment the water
stops pulling you under
and you realize
you are standing.

The anger
dressed in your name
belonged to someone
you would never meet.

The sharpness that was really fear.
The silence that was really grief
Each, the face of indifference
because it had nowhere else to go.

You stop absorbing.
You begin to watch.
And the watching…
quiet, undefended,
changes everything it touches.

Shape OutGrown

I carried a role so long
I forgot it was a costume.

The one who translated herself
into whatever language
the room required
to stay comfortable.

I wore it sincerely.
That’s the part that costs something.
Not that I was performing,
but that I felt genuine
inside a shape
that was never quite mine.

When I finally saw the pattern
I couldn’t unknow it.
The role felt tight and even itchy.
Then smaller.
Then simply…impossible.

And I stepped out of it.
Not dramatically,
not with an announcement,
just one quiet refusal
to finish the scene.

Clearing Season

Some things you can clear
as fast as they become old.
Remove what no longer belongs.
Bring the outside up to speed.
That’s its own, beautiful kind of intelligence.

But some furniture isn’t yours to move.
I have leaned into it. Anyway.
I know this now…the long way.

What can be cleared you clear.
Quietly, at your pace, without ceremony.
The thing that no longer fits.
The friendship that has run its honest course.
The project that belonged to who you were.

You shift what is yours to shift.
You wait for the rest with your hands open
Not empty.
Preparing.

There is always something.
The relationship not ready
to shift with you.
The place you cannot yet leave.
The role that still
has your name on it.

What do you do
when you’re changing inside
but the room around you
hasn’t yet been told?
Or can’t be?

I believe you stay
Not because you haven’t tried.
Because it isn’t yours to move.
Maybe not just yet.

Grief Without a Grave

The play continued without me.
Other people kept delivering their lines
into the space
where I used to be.

And the room…
the actual room,
with its familiar light
and its familiar warmth,
still fit everyone
except the version of me
that existed now.

This is the grief that doesn’t announce itself.
Not for what you lost.
For what you outgrew.
Slower. Without ceremony.
The kind no one thinks to ask about.

No one brings flowers
for this kind of ending.
No one knows there was one.
Only you.

You stay in the room
while it’s still arranged
for who you were.
Present inside the dissonance.
Watching from a small, honest distance.

You are in the in-between.
Not a fragment.
Syntactically alive,
always in the act of meaning.
Unfinished,
But never incomplete.

Always Now

The loneliness is real.
I won’t pretend otherwise.

It is the loneliness of changing frequency
in a room full of people
still tuned to the old signal.

Of stepping out of a pattern
and watching the space you left
close quietly over,
as if you were never there.

I have arrived somewhere true.
Quieter here than I expected.
Sometimes lonelier.
But mine.

Both things are true.
They live in the same body.
You don’t have to choose.

The beginning is fixed.
The end is unknown.
The only inhabitable moment
is the middle.
And the middle is always now.

The in-between
was never temporary.
It is where all living
actually happens.

Transitional solitude
is part of the story
of a conscious life.

Not everyone arrives
at this particular threshold,
but those who do
tend to know it in their bones.

And this…
quiet, unresolved, still becoming…
is not a room you are waiting to leave.

It is the one
you finally
stopped leaving.

· · ·

For the one who has seen and cannot unsee.
Learning slowly to trust the quiet.

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Before you begin, know this: This is not a story about reinvention. It’s a story about remembering.

About the quiet fire that lives beneath performance, beneath ambition - an ember tucked behind the ribs, steady as breath - beneath the polished narrative of who we think we are supposed to be.

It’s about the in-between. That tender, liminal space where identities loosen, masks fall, and something truer begins to glow.

If you have ever felt the heat of a truth you could not yet name, if you have ever stood at your window sensing that something inside you was ready to shift, this is for you.

Walk slowly. There is a flame here that burns to illuminate.

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The Pilot Light of Truth

There was a woman who carried a small, quiet knowing in her heart. A warmth she couldn’t quite explain. Like the first sip of tea traveling down. Like a yes the body says before the mind agrees.

It didn’t shout. It didn’t argue. It didn’t beg to be chosen. It simply stayed burning.

Not dramatically. Not wildly. But rather, like a pilot light: steady, patient, waiting for the moment someone turns the knob.

For years, she mistook it for anxiety. She believed she was simply overthinking. Being “too much” in rooms that preferred smallness, or “too little” in rooms that rewarded spectacle.

She labeled it sensitivity. Mood. A flaw.

And sometimes she dared to call it intuition. Only in whispers. Never when others could hear. Because to admit it was intuition would mean she had been ignoring something deliberate.

It was not fear. It wasn’t failure. It wasn’t loneliness dressed as wisdom. It was unspoken truth.

And such truth has a way of making itself felt in the body long before it is welcomed by the mind.

Blue Hour In-Between

One evening, she found herself sitting at her writing desk long after the sun had dissolved into night. The last stripe of amber light had slipped from the windowpane, leaving the room a muted blue, as if the room had stopped pretending.

The house was quiet, except for the hum of the refrigerator down the hall and the faint, rhythmic ticking of the clock above the doorway. She hadn’t noticed the time passing. She hadn’t noticed she’d gone perfectly still, fingers resting lightly on the worn-down edges of her journal.

And then she felt it again. That heat behind her ribs.

It wasn’t sharp, nor alarming. But simply present, like a breath at her shoulder.

Her pulse quickened, and she thought it was panic at first. But the longer she stayed with it, the clearer it became. It was recognition. Recognition of the truth she had ignored.

The eye in the flame.

After twenty-some years, it was no longer content to be glimpsed in passing thoughts or buried beneath productivity. It stepped forward, and she began to listen.

As the woman leaned back in her chair, the room felt smaller. Not claustrophobic. Intimate, as though the walls themselves were listening…and waiting.

Language vs. Life

She had always known her past had happened for a reason. She had made peace with that narrative. And today, she could articulate it beautifully if asked.

Growth. Lessons. Divine timing. The language of healing came easily off her tongue. But language is not the same as embodiment. She knew that all too well.

Some relationships had ended long before they officially ended. She had felt their retreat in the subtle thinning of laughter, in the pauses between messages, in the way her chest tightened when she tried to explain herself for the hundredth time.

She had stayed anyway. Not out of desperation, she told herself, but loyalty. Hope. A practice of patience. And yet something in her had known.

She knew the version of herself she was performing was not the one who wanted to stay. And the most unsettling part was that it wasn’t only true about relationships.

It had been speaking through more than one door.

Many Beginnings, No Anchor

A woman now inching closer to her 30s had built many beginnings. Many paths of life. She tried them on the way she tried on versions of herself. Carefully, sincerely, with hope.

Each path made sense on paper - in neat bullet points, in resumes saved as ‘Final_pdf.’, in tabs left open at 2 a.m.” Each opportunity seemed promising when explained aloud. Each role held the possibility of becoming something solid.

An engineer. An anthropologist. A barista and babysitter. A freelance photographer and fiction writer. Psychology, too.

And yet, every time she stepped into one fully, something inside her remained untouched. ‘Unwarmed.’

She was competent. Curious. Adaptable. And people trusted her with responsibility. They praised her thoughtfulness, her steadiness, her range. And in many ways, she was all of those things.

But the flame behind her ribs never fully warmed in those places. It flickered, patient, as if waiting for something unnamed.

She was living in the in-between, not knowing that’s where magic actually exists if you pay attention closely. Not the magic of instant answers. The magic of aliveness.

She had yet to fully embody the pulse of becoming, the quiet intelligence of not-yet, the place where you can be multiple and still be whole.

Rooms and Roles Within the Doorway

And beneath the shifting careers, beneath the staying and the searching, there were the masks of identity.

The agreeable one. The ambitious one. The mysterious one. The self-sufficient one. She wore them so seamlessly that she almost forgot they were costumes. Choices.

They helped her enter rooms. They helped her survive conversations. They helped her be understood, or at least tolerated. These masks performed well and kept the peace. But they never stayed with her once the door closed.

When she returned home - to this desk, to this muted blue room - the masks slipped quietly to the floor. And she was left with the heat. The knowing.

It frightened her not because it threatened to destroy her life, but because it threatened to reveal how often she had been negotiating with it.

How many times had she softened a sentence before she spoke, and called it kindness?
How many times had she chosen harmony over honesty?
How many times had she mistaken adaptability for authenticity?

She placed her palm flat against her sternum. The warmth pulsed back. Steady, unimpressed by the act.

Truth does not accuse. It waits. And now it was no longer willing to wait quietly.

The Glass Window

She had learned how to live beside discomfort. To function through it daily. But this was different.

This was not discomfort. This was clarity. It pressed from the inside like a truth that had grown too large to keep hidden.

She tried to distract herself. Without hesitation, she reached for her phone. Set it down. Opened her journal, scribbled, closed it again. Even the smallest tasks felt theatrical, like props she was moving around to avoid stepping onstage.

The quiet in the room grew heavier. The air thickened. And she noticed a moment had arrived - the one when she knows something is about to change, not because anything outside her shifts, but because resistance begins to feel more exhausting than surrender.

She stood and walked to the windowsill by her desk.

Outside, the streetlamp flickered on. Its light caught the glass, and for a moment she saw herself superimposed against the night. Her breath fainting on the glass, then disappearing. Her bare face layered over darkness. Her tired eyes floating over the world like a ghost.

Two versions at once. The one who knew. And the one who avoided knowing.

Her throat began to tighten. The truth was not abstract. It was specific.

It was the phone call she had been postponing. The application she had not submitted. The boundary she had rehearsed but never spoken. The love she had been accepting in fractions.

It was the simple, devastating recognition that she had been shrinking in places that required her to expand.

And there it was. The beautiful edge - the moment the air feels thin and you can’t go back without lying.

She could already feel the argument forming in her mind: Not now. Be practical. Don’t be dramatic. You’re overthinking this.

The old voices were loyal. They had kept her safe. But safety in the in-between, she understood, is not the same as aliveness in this liminal space.

Her hand pressed harder against her chest. The heat pulsed once. So insistent.

Truth does not demand. It reveals. In the blue hush of late evening, she understood something that terrified and steadied her at the same time.

If she looked directly at this flame, she would not be able to unsee it. For unseeing is a luxury of the unconscious.

She closed her eyes. For one beat. One single moment. Then, instead of pushing the heat away, she leaned toward it and invited it in.

She asked without words, only willingness: What are you showing me?

The answer did not come as language. It came as loosening. A gentle crack in the shape she had been holding. Not broken, but rather, breaking open.

And when she finally looked, it hurt. Not because truth is cruel. But because the cushion of not knowing had been soft. Illusion is comfort with a mask.

The stories we tell ourselves are padded with hope and fear and the desire to belong. Yet, truth strips the padding. It asks only this: Will you look?

She did. And everything began to dissolve. A smile she hadn’t worn in years arrived, small and startled.

Unbecoming: The Saltwater Flame

At first, dissolution felt like loss. Not dramatic. Not announced. The quieter kind. The kind that happens in spaces between thoughts, where the mind goes quiet for a beat.

The identity she had built so carefully began loosening at the edges. She noticed it in small, strange ways. Her shoulders dropped when she stopped pretending to be fine. Her mouth went dry when she tried to rehearse an old explanation. Her own name sounded unfamiliar inside her head.

The expectations she carried - daughter, partner, achiever, good girl - softened and slipped, as if they were finally tired of being held.

She reached for the glass of water on her desk. The cold rim against her bare lips. She drank, and for some reason that simple act undid her, as though her body had been waiting for permission to be a body - not a performance.

It felt like falling into water. Like salt surrendering into sea. A saltwater flame.

Not a contradiction, but a truth: that in the moment you dissolve - when you stop bracing and allow yourself to melt - something luminous can live there.

A flame that doesn’t scorch. A fire that glows underwater. A kind of aliveness born inside surrender.

Naively, she thought she was disappearing. But something more subtle was happening. She was unbecoming. Not erasing herself, but dissolving the versions of herself that had formed in response to survival.

Dissolution is misunderstood. We think it is destruction. When the ego begins to melt, it panics: Danger. Failure. Losing control.

But it is alchemy. The ego calling it death, the soul recognizing it as homecoming.

In the dissolving, she discovered something vast. A spaciousness between the roles. Without the old shape, she felt formless, almost infinite.

She grieved who she thought she was, who others thought she was. She grieved the illusion of certainty.

And in that grief, something warm began to glow.

Not relief. Not yet. Just a faint inner light, as if beneath the melting, something truer has always been waiting to blossom.

The Golden Circle: Learning to Stay

Connection did not arrive as fireworks. It arrived as softness. Quiet. Sure.

The next morning, half-awake and unguarded, the woman placed her hand over her heart. Not out of drama - out of instinct. And she felt warmth. Not panic.

The flame was still there. But it no longer warned her. It lit her from within.

She stood at the sink and let the water run over her hands longer too long, watching it catch the light before it disappeared down the drain. Something in her loosened again. Gently. As if her body had learned a new language: stay here.

She began speaking differently. From inside her own truth. She stopped waiting for others to “make the move.” She stopped shrinking to keep the peace. She stopped explaining her intuition as if it needed translation.

And then, almost quietly, her life responded. Not with miracles. With proof.

A message left on read, and her chest didn’t collapse into self-blame. A boundary spoken in a steady voice, and the world didn’t end. A goodbye that felt clean and not cruel. A yes that didn’t cost her breath.

And the strangest thing happened: the more she connected to herself, the less she reached for it in others. Especially those who didn’t stay.

Some relationships fell away. Not as punishment. As proof. What couldn’t meet her honestly couldn’t stay. And what remained was more gentle. Reciprocal. Alive.

She learned intimacy isn’t merging to disappear. It’s standing whole and letting someone meet you there.

Truth had not ruined her life. It had refined it.

Dissolution had not erased her. It had returned her to her edges, and she walked the in-between with grace. The place where she could finally feel what was hers and what was not.

Connection, she realized, was not something she had to search for. It was what emerged when she stopped leaving her own body behind. When she stopped abandoning herself.

If you look closely, you can see it in her now: the eye in the flame, the spiral of surrender, the golden center glowing through her silhouette.

She isn’t finished becoming. None of us are.

But she knows this: Truth is not the enemy. Dissolution is not death. Connection begins within.

And sometimes, the bravest thing a woman can do is look directly into the fire. And not look away.

This was me.

Maybe you know this feeling. The quiet heat behind your ribs. The version of yourself that has been waiting, patient, unresentful, steady, like a hand held out in the dark.

Maybe you have mistaken it for anxiety. For restlessness. For being too much or not enough for the rooms you’ve entered.

Or maybe you’re standing at your own window tonight, watching your reflection layered over the dark.

There is a place between who we have been and who we are becoming. It isn’t glamorous or linear. It doesn’t always look like progress. Instead, it looks like uncertainty. Unraveling. Shedding. Standing still while everything inside you shifts.

But this in-between is not a hallway. It’s a hearth. A place that holds heat, even when the house is quiet.

And in that hearth, you can be many things and still be whole. You don’t have to exile any part of yourself to belong. You don’t have to pick one clean identity to be complete. You don’t need to blow up your life to honor the flame. You only have to stop turning away from it.

Truth is quieter than fear. But it endures. It holds you close. And when you choose, even trembling, to sit with it, something extraordinary makes its way to you.

You begin to trust yourself.

The fire was never there to burn you. It was there to bring you home. So, if you feel it, take a look. Not to become someone new. Not to put on a new mask. But to remember the soul who has been there all along. And with grace, come back to it.

• Is there a mask you've worn so long you've forgotten it's a costume?

• What is the one thing you know is true about yourself that you keep explaining away?

• When did you first notice the flame? And what did you call it before you knew what it was?

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DISCLAIMER: All images and visual artwork included in this essay were photographed and edited by Amparo Pareja.

This piece begins where the poem, “You Never Asked Me to Choose,” left off…

The Story We’re Told

We’re taught that the in-between is a phase. A hallway. A pause meant to be outgrown.

Something to pass through on the way to clarity. Something unfinished. Evidence that we haven’t figured things out yet, and the hope that one day – after enough ‘fixing’ – we’ll finally arrive somewhere solid.

Yet, many of us never arrive there. Not because we failed, but because maybe we were never meant to leave.

What if the in-between isn’t a phase at all? What if it’s a place of intelligence, an identity the world never actually taught us how to name?

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The Truth of the In-Between

If you’ve never lived it, the in-between can sound abstract, like an idea, a mood, a phase. But the in-between is far from that.

The in-between is not confusion. It isn’t being lost. It isn’t a failure to decide.

The in-between is an ongoing experience of becoming while still carrying where you came from. It is the lived space to honor and inhabit who you were and who you became. Both are still alive inside you. It is the tension of holding more than one truth at once: past and present, origin and adaptation, memory and survival - without being able to collapse yourself into something neat. Maybe when more than one language, culture, or role asks to be held simultaneously.

And while many of us can recognize the in-between through separation from one’s origins and cultural assimilation, others have lived it through the simplest thresholds - between jobs, between love, between versions of life that haven’t fully arrived yet.

In the context of assimilation, though, the in-between becomes especially charged. It can feel like a state of limbo, where you’re alienated from both your origins and the dominant, new culture you’re trying to survive inside. You begin to ask questions:

• How do you fit into the culture you left behind?

• How do you belong in a new culture that imitates an identity you could never fully fit into?

• How do you walk the in-between without fear?

When someone lives in that terrain without language for it, it can feel like being trapped between two completely different worlds. That’s scary for many, forever seeking belonging without feeling progress. That’s why the in-between gets mislabeled as “confusion.”

But the real issue isn’t the in-between. The real issue is living there with shame.

When shame enters the in-between, it doesn’t just hurt. It reorganizes your identity. It convinces you that the tension you’re carrying is proof that you’re broken. And whispers: “You’re not enough of this. You’re too much of that. You don’t fully belong anywhere.”

In that kind of inner weather, the in-between becomes a pressure chamber - fear, blame, and disconnection looping over and over. Therefore, people try to solve the discomfort the only way they’ve been taught: by picking a side.

It’s important to recognize that the in-between can often feel uncomfortable - not because something is wrong, but because this space resists simplification. It doesn’t fit the clean, concrete categories a world obsessed with clarity demands. So, we’re taught to treat this space as temporary - something to fix, escape, or outgrow.

Some of us live between languages. Some between cultures. Some between the person we were shaped to be and the person we learned to become in order to survive. Yet, all are told this means we’re unfinished. That we’re still “finding ourselves.” What’s truly radical is that the body knows something else.

The body knows the in-between is not empty. It is dense with memory, layered with inheritance, loss, intuition, and adaptation.

It is not absence. It is multiplicity.

The First and Second Identity

When people talk about identity, we’re usually handed two options:

• First Identity: Who you were shaped to be by origin – culture, family, language, ancestry, early self.

• Second Identity: Who you learned to be in order to survive, succeed, or belong – adaptation, assimilation, professionalism, masking.

Most frameworks quietly assume that a sense of belonging means either choosing one over the other, or merging them into a clean, unified whole.

But for many people – especially those shaped by cultural rupture, trauma, or systems of the body, mind and spirit that demand conformity – that never fully works.

Because the truth is: you can’t always “blend” your way out of a life that required translation. You shouldn’t have to erase one part to prove loyalty to the other.

Arriving at the Third Identity

I didn’t arrive at the third identity as a concept first. I arrived at it as a lived reality.

In my research, I have explored and written about first-generation immigrants being more likely to live in the in-between - not belonging fully in either their original culture or their assimilated one - and about what happens to the psyche when acceptance feels just out of reach.

That description wasn’t theoretical for me. It was my body remembering what it felt like to carry an identity that kept getting translated by other people: my accent, my name, my belonging, my “enoughness.” And then I found language that reframed the entire experience.

I believe the in-between can hold many names, many descriptions. One of my favorites is by writer and theorist Gloria Anzaldúa, who named this space the “borderlands” – not as confusion, but as consciousness. It is a way of seeing that can hold paradox without demanding resolution.

Anzaldúa further describes the border as “una herida abierta” (an open wound) that forms a “third country – a border culture.” A third country. A third space. A place with its own ground.

That’s when it clicked: if the in-between can be a “third country,” then maybe the self that learns to live there is not half-and-half.

Maybe, it’s a third identity.

Knowing the Third Identity

The third identity is not confusion. It is not compromise. It is not a fixed label.

The third identity exists in a relational position – a lived place in between ancestral memory and present reality, where loss and creation coexist. A safe space where you can speak in layered sentences. Where grief for what was lost doesn’t cancel gratitude for what was gained. Where you don’t have to abandon one part of yourself to prove loyalty to another.

Here, you stop asking “Which one am I?” and begin asking “How do these live in me?”

Through that inner exploration, the third identity emerges as the self that stops trying to choose between who you were and who you learned to be. It stops being about something you perform and transforms into something you inhabit: the consciousness formed by living between worlds without abandoning either.

All in all, the third identity is the wholeness of the in-between – the you that learned to translate, adapt, and hold contradiction without collapsing into shame. It’s not a blended self, but a witnessing one, holding all parts with awareness.

And this is where courage comes in. It is an act of courage to refuse erasure, resist simplification, and live unnamed for a while – trusting your wholeness does not depend on perfect arrival. It requires belonging to yourself, exactly where you are.

The Third Identity In-Between Disciplines

From a psychological lens, the third identity can be viewed as the integrated observing self. Instead of saying: “I must be this version or that version,” it says: “I am the one who has lived both and can hold awareness of them.”

This aligns with the concept of narrative identity: you are not the story, but rather the storyteller. It also names the intelligence of identities formed through adaptation – the ways we learned to survive, translate, and belong.

The third identity is the self that no longer has to perform belonging in exile. It is whole.

Culturally speaking, many Indigenous worldviews do not see identity as singular or static. Born in Ecuador, I honor the Andean heritage and its cosmological approach to life. In this case, identity is relational, seasonal, and essentially shaped by land, ancestors, movement, and time. From this perspective, to be “in-between” is not to be split. It is to be in conversation.

Standardized systems, however, taught us to fear this space. They taught us that belonging must be singular. That clarity must be linear. That contradiction means failure.

So when we hold more than one truth – loving more than one place, speaking with more than one tongue, carrying grief and gratitude at the same time – we may assume something is wrong with us if we don’t conform.

We may call it confusion. Instability. Identity loss. But often, the in-between didn’t come from indecision. It came from embracing a multifaceted identity – a third identity. Not half of one thing and half of another, but the full reality of living-in-between life’s experiences with wholeness intact.

The Intelligence of the In-Between

For many of us, living between worlds was how we stayed alive. We learned how to soften certain truths, emphasize others, and translate ourselves depending on the room. This was not weakness. It was intelligence.

What fractured us wasn’t the in-between itself. It was living there without language, self-permission, or dignity – being taught to choose coherence over truth. So many individuals try to put on a mask of the culture that will accept us, the version of ourselves that’s easiest to explain.

As mentioned, this is where shame enters quietly, but shame is not evidence that the in-between is wrong. It is evidence that the world doesn’t know how to hold complexity with care.

This is why reclaiming the in-between matters. When the in-between is honored as a third identity, something softens. The nervous system stops bracing. The inner exile eases. You stop rushing toward certainty just to earn rest.

You realize you are not late to becoming yourself. You are already here.

A Final Truth for Reclamation

The third identity isn’t who you were. It isn’t who you finally became. It’s who you return to when you stop abandoning parts of yourself in order to belong. The authentic self that knows how to live with complexity without turning it into shame.

I return again and again to this: the shame we hold inside loosens when truth is spoken and met without compassion. And that compassion has to begin with you. You offer it to yourself first, so you can show the way for others to do the same.

And this is why I believe storytelling matters so much. As storyteller and listener Mark Yaconelli (2022) writes, “Sharing stories is how we make a home within ourselves and one another. Story is how we put together the broken pieces. Story is how we identify and heal the suffering within and among us.” Storytelling becomes a path to releasing internalized shame and externalized masking. It is being vulnerable with intention and letting yourself be seen without disappearing. In the truest sense, story is one of the ways identity survives and restores.

When we don’t know our ancestors’ narratives, and even less our own, we don’t just lose information. We lose orientation. We lose the thread that connects us to where we came from –one of the two edges of the in-between – and that can quietly turn into a lost sense of identity to where we are going. Disconnection from story becomes disconnection from land, community, and even self.

But when we tell stories, especially the unknown and the unwanted, we reconnect and begin to create counternarratives. These are the stories through which you stop letting other people translate you. You reclaim your name, your memories and roots, your inner voice. You take what was fragmented by loss – what got softened, hidden, edited for survival – and you begin to weave it back into something whole. You return to complexity and reignite its power.

This is also why the third identity of the in-between is a narrative one. It’s an ever-evolving story of the self that brings unity, meaning, and direction – not because it makes your life simple, but because it lets your life be true without becoming shameful.

Therefore, knowing and sharing your own narrative becomes more than art. It becomes a practice of coming back home.

For me, storytelling is my path to living in the in-between and owning my third identity. It’s how I’ve learned to hold my origins and lived experiences in me alongside everything I learned to become. How I’ve learned to release the shame of living in-between and replace it with a belonging that comes from within. I honor my stories every day.

So, if you’re here too, if you’ve been living in the in-between, maybe your next step isn’t to “arrive.” Maybe it’s to name what’s true and share it.

Remember, story can restore what was interrupted. It can be reclamation. It doesn’t just describe who you are, but it also allows you to return to your most authentic self.

And so, the final truth I leave you with…

The third identity is how I live. Storytelling is how I stay and build a home within.

A Gentle Journaling Invitation

If you feel called, sit with one:

1. Where am I rushing to “arrive”?

2. What parts of my identity have I been hiding to belong, and what would it look like to let them live beside each other?

3. If the in-between is not a problem to solve but a ground to stand on, what truth about me wants to be named?

4. If I stopped rushing toward certainty, what might I finally hear?

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You never asked me to choose
which language to dream in,
which version of myself
to make small enough to carry.

You let me stand
with one foot remembering
and the other learning
how survival reshapes the body.

You held my accent gently,
did not rush my mouth
into certainty.
You allowed my name rest
without translation.

Some parts of myself have wandered,
stretched between the poles,
mistaking motion for escape,
mistaking stillness for being stuck.

Even in that uncertainty,
something in you kept pulling,
a quiet center calling me back
before I knew what I was returning to.

They called you confusion.
Said you were a hallway,
a delay,
a failure to arrive.

But you felt more like a widening road,
held between growing expectations.
Not to narrow me, but to teach me
how to walk in complexity.

You revealed yourself
as a field of potential:
open through the middle,
asking me not to hurry,
not to disappear forward,
but to walk slowly
and let myself take shape.

In you - in the in-between -
I learned that contradiction
does not cancel truth.
That grief and gratitude
can share the same breath.

When the world demanded clarity,
you offered me ground.
When I tried to leave myself behind,
you stayed.

You never asked me to decide who I was.
You gave me a place to find belonging
within the in-between,
without disappearing
at the edges of what the world expects.

~ AUTHOR’S NOTE ~

This poem is a doorway.

In my next piece, The In-Between Is Not Confusion: The Third Identity, I give language to the space this poem is speaking from.

For some, it’s not a phase to move past, but as a place to inhabit.

I write about the intelligence of living between worlds, about what’s possible when we stop treating the in-between as a problem and begin recognizing it as a form of belonging.

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January does not ask us to run.
It asks us to arrive.
It doesn’t ring a bell or demand a new name.
It opens the door and steps back.

Come as you are, it says.
Not polished. Not resolved.
Just here, in this body I am living in, in this life that has found me.

The year turns,
but the mind does not wipe itself clean.
The nervous system does not bow to calendars as commands to transform.
The body, wise and honest, does not believe in overnight becoming.

And still, the noise tries to rise.
Trackers, routines, vision boards,
framing who we must be
before we’ve even landed in who we are.

But something quieter waits beneath it all.
At the threshold, an ending completes itself.
A door closes without spectacle.
A year exhales.

Every true beginning is born and integrated this way.
From digestion, not declaration.
From rest, not rush.
From what has been metabolized in the dark.

From a conscious ending.

Arrival is not transformation.
It is inhabitation.
Standing fully inside your own life,
honestly without apology.

Winter knows this.
Trees do not hurry to leaf.
They do not explain their bare branches.
The earth pulls inward,
choosing survival over performance.

The inner spirit of conserving and tending to what is unseen.

This is not stagnation.
This is preparation.

And so, the invitation is simple and radical:
Land gently.
Stop rehearsing the future.
Listen for what is already here.

January does not shout.
It whispers.
It teaches stillness like a language.

Arrival is a practice of presence.

Notice how you are holding the day.
Admit what you are tired of carrying.
Let the quiet griefs surface,
the ones that had nowhere to go.
And recognize that your nervous system
has been doing its best.

This is not a month for goals.
It’s a set of days for grounding,
for asking: What does it feel like to be here – really?

Grounding is not fixing.
It is allowing.
Feeling where you are without rushing to change it.
Landing in the truth of your life before asking it to move.

There is courage in this pause.
Safety in this arrival.

When we stop demanding improvement,
the body softens.
When we stop chasing forward,
the present becomes inhabitable.

Clarity does come
but not through force.
It arrives through attention,
through the quiet vow of
I am listening.

Nothing in nature blooms being rushed.
Roots grow in darkness.
Seeds split open underground.
The most important work happens unseen.

So if you begin this year feeling
slow, tender, uncertain, quiet,
you are not late.
You are aligning with the season.

A year has closed its door.
Before reaching for what’s next,
pause at the threshold.

I am here.
This is what remains.
This is what I carry forward.

Remember, arrival is not passive.
It is presence.
The choice to tell the truth
about where you are
before deciding where you’re going.

Let yourself arrive without agenda.
Honor the body before asking it for more.
Let your writing hold you, not measure you.
Give space for your breath to set the pace.
Invite the year to begin with devotion rather than demand.

You do not need to know
who you will be by the end of this year.
You only need to be here now.

And this ground,
quiet, steady, real,
is more than enough to begin.

From here,
something true will rise.
From root to bloom.

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Captive, she believed herself to be.

A body shackled,
a soul estranged,
a presence cloaked,
in silence or in flee.

Slowly breaking beneath a world unkind.

A spirit bent,
a being fractured,
a maze of sorrow,
entombed in her mind.

Oh, rotten orchard, fruit too long left to cling.

Ripeness soured,
sweetness collapsed,
each withering apple whispered decay,
branches bare against a sky so gray.

Her vision blurred. Her hearing hollowed.

And of what became her heart
but a forsaken asylum,
where night fell and fear walked,
heavy sorrow with unnamed prayers.

Cruel inscriptions carved within, marks of sorrow, sweet lines of sin.

Upon a soul’s crumbling wall,
each echo deeper, each shadow tall.
The silence roared, the dark crept in,
and nothing seemed to break the din.

But seasons shift, time not be still.

It heeds no plea,
nor bends to will,
but marches forth,
unyielding still.

Life pressed on, amidst the chaos.

She drowned in stillness,
a witness unwilling
to her own undoing
of her silence unending.

Graveyard of shadows, she gathered inside.

Sorrow of her own command,
chained by her very hands.
The world moved on, the hours died.
Only grief stayed, walking side by side.

She saw it then, life unrelenting.

Utter deafness to her cries,
to narratives she knit and wove,
to lies she devoured whole,
to the pain of the unbending.

Until at last, the mirror spoke.

Its silver tongue
cut through
no stranger’s venom,
but her own.

Acid swirling, burning eyes.

In truth unveiled
her own reflection,
her own remembrance,
beneath disguise, beyond all lies.

Face to face, she pierced the glass.

Beheld no poison foreign,
no venom amassed,
but rather the residue
of forgetting past.

Pearl of grief slid soft and slow

Saltwater, mother of sorrow,
carved the face she’d know,
and tears baptized
the open heart below.

Saltwater bore the ache of years.

Flame rose bright
to burn her fears.
Love reborn,
tempered by tears.

By tremor of truth, her fists released.

Her chest flung wide,
and chains fell down.
From sorrow’s hold,
she found her peace.

Yes.

Yes, to torch the myth that love could never bloom.
Yes, to shatter the prison bars where only pain had been.
Yes, to release the weight that had turned her heart so bleak.
Yes, to finally welcome the seed of love within.

Her heart, once a derelict house
with curtains drawn tight,
each time blind to day,
flung its windows wide and stayed.

Light did not fall from the heavens.
It erupted from within,
from an inner flame already burning,
awaiting her own gaze to let it in.

She crowned herself with love,
no longer scavenging,
no longer shrinking,
no longer masked.

Love is no transient guest.

It is the marrow.
The pulse.
The everlasting tenant.

It breathes with her.
Beats through her.
Becomes her.

To know herself was to brush fingers against the All.

To unmask was to feel
the hum beneath her skin,
a steady pulse,
she’d mistaken for silence.

Unburdened, she bears in reverence.

Saltwater flame.
Eternal embrace.
As daylight breathes,
and nightfall gathers,
a growing heart holds
a place without end.

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I’ve wandered roads both rough and wide,
I’ve chased fleeting dreams & shifting skies.
At times, I walked with steady stride,
At times, I fell and believed many lies.

I’ve searched for signs, for something true,
A single voice to tell me who I am.
Yet every path just led me to
More questions I could not understand.

I’ve changed my shape, I’ve played a role,
Even been quiet when longed to speak.
I’ve dimmed my light to fit the mold,
Made myself small, made myself weak.

But in this space, when all is still,
I hear a voice, so soft yet real,
Reminding me of my own free will.

I am the moon, I am the tide,
I am the storm, the flame, the open sea.
I do not need to run or hide—
I am enough. Just let it be.

Unchained from what once felt wrong,
The tenderness I feared to show.
My heart beats fierce, my hands are strong,
Yet tender in all the ways they know.

I trace the curves I used to hate,
The lines that tell the life I’ve led.
No longer wishing to escape,
I stand within myself instead.

I honor love, both given and lost,
The ways I broke and still became.
I learn that nothing’s truly lost,
Each scar still hums, but without shame.

I let my art move through my hands,
Let stories spill from ink and skin.
I dance, I dream, I make, I mend,
I grow more whole with all within.

I don’t need to chase or compare,
No need to prove my worth & endlessly roam.
With every breath, with creative care,
One day at a time, I find my way back home.

And when the road bends out of sight,
I trust the wind to guide my feet.
For home is not a single place,
It’s every step where I feel complete.

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