There’s a particular kind of restlessness that settles over you when you’re no longer who you used to be, but not yet who you’re becoming. You’ve outgrown your old life, but the new one hasn’t quite taken shape. You’re standing in a doorway, one foot in the past and one reaching toward a future that remains frustratingly unclear.
This is the in-between stage, and if you’re in one right now, you’re likely feeling some combination of excited, terrified, lost, hopeful, and exhausted.
The in-between stages are perhaps the most universal human experience we rarely talk about honestly. We celebrate beginnings and endings, but the messy middle—where most of life actually happens—gets glossed over in our highlight reels. Yet these transitional periods shape us more profoundly than the destinations we eventually reach.
What are the in-between stages?
The in-between stages are those liminal spaces where you exist between two distinct chapters of your life. You might be:
- Between jobs, having left one career but not yet started the next
- In a relationship that’s changing, where you’re no longer strangers but not quite settled partners
- Recovering from illness or injury, no longer acutely unwell but not yet fully healthy
- Finishing education without knowing exactly what comes next
- Watching your children grow, mourning who they were while meeting who they’re becoming
- Grieving a loss while slowly, painfully rebuilding
- Living somewhere temporarily, not quite a tourist but not quite home
- Changing your body through fitness, diet, or transition, caught between before and after
- Building a business or creative project that hasn’t gained traction yet but demands your faith
The defining characteristic of these stages isn’t just that you’re in transition—it’s that you can’t speed through them. You have to live them, day by sometimes excruciating day, without knowing exactly when or how they’ll end.
Why in-between stages feel so uncomfortable
Our culture has little patience for ambiguity. We’re addicted to certainty, to five-year plans, to knowing where we stand. Social media amplifies this, showing us carefully curated snapshots of people firmly planted in their “arrived” moments—the new job announcement, the engagement photo, the “after” picture, the book deal, the keys to the new house.
What we don’t see are the months or years of uncertainty that preceded those moments. The applications that went unanswered. The dates that went nowhere. The manuscript rejections. The house viewings that fell through. The daily discipline when results were invisible.
This creates a strange psychological phenomenon: we intellectually understand that everyone goes through transitions, but emotionally, we feel like we’re the only ones stuck in limbo while everyone else has figured it out.
The identity crisis aspect
In-between stages often trigger identity confusion because so much of how we define ourselves is tied to external markers. When someone asks “What do you do?” and you don’t have a clear answer, it can feel destabilizing. When your relationship status is “it’s complicated,” when your living situation is temporary, when your health is “getting better but not there yet”—these ambiguous states make it hard to know who you are in this moment.
We’re conditioned to introduce ourselves through our roles and accomplishments: “I’m a teacher,” “I’m married,” “I’m a runner,” “I’m from Seattle.” But what are you when you’ve quit teaching and haven’t started your new career? When your marriage has ended but you’re not yet comfortable being single? When injury has stopped you from running? When you’ve moved but your new city doesn’t feel like home?
You’re in-between, and that’s an identity too—it’s just one our culture hasn’t given us good language for.
The comparison trap
When you’re in an in-between stage, it’s easy to look around and feel like you’re behind. Your friends seem settled. Your former classmates have clear career trajectories. People younger than you have already achieved what you’re still working toward.
But here’s what’s usually true: many of those people are either in their own in-between stages (they’re just not posting about it), or they’ve been through difficult transitions to get where they are, or they’ll face their own uncertain periods soon enough. Life isn’t linear for anyone, even when it looks that way from the outside.
The lack of validation
There’s no social recognition for being in transition. You don’t get congratulations for day 47 of job searching, for month three of slowly rebuilding after a breakup, for the quiet Tuesday when you showed up to physical therapy again. The hard work of persisting through uncertainty doesn’t come with applause, raises, or likes.
Yet this work—the unglamorous persistence through unclear times—is often where the most significant growth happens.
The paradox of in-between stages
Here’s what makes these periods so psychologically complex: they’re simultaneously the hardest times and the most transformative ones.
When you’re firmly planted in a stable life phase, you’re comfortable but perhaps not growing much. You’ve adapted to your circumstances. You know the routine. You’ve found your equilibrium.
But in the in-between stages, everything is unfamiliar. You’re forced to question assumptions, develop new skills, discover resilience you didn’t know you had, and figure out what actually matters to you when all the external structures fall away.
It’s in the uncertainty that we’re most alive, most present, most forced to make conscious choices rather than living on autopilot. The discomfort is precisely what makes it valuable.
The paradox is that we often can’t see this while we’re in it. It’s only in retrospect that we recognize those difficult transitional periods as the times we grew the most, clarified our values, or set the foundation for who we’d become.
What nobody tells you about in-between stages
They’re longer than you think they’ll be
When you first enter an in-between stage, you typically underestimate how long it will last. You think: “I’ll find a new job in a month or two.” “This grief will ease up soon.” “The business will take off within six months.”
But real transitions—the ones that involve fundamental change—take time. Sometimes years. This doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong or that you’re stuck. It means you’re in a genuine transformation, and those don’t happen overnight.
Progress isn’t linear
You’ll have days when you feel like you’re finally getting somewhere, followed by days when you feel like you’ve regressed. This isn’t failure—it’s the natural rhythm of growth. You’re not moving in a straight line from point A to point B; you’re spiraling, circling back to revisit lessons from new angles, integrating change at a pace your psyche can handle.
You’ll probably try to rush through them
The discomfort of not knowing, of being between states, often triggers an urgency to force resolution. You might make impulsive decisions just to escape the uncertainty—taking the wrong job because you can’t stand being unemployed, jumping into a new relationship before you’ve processed the last one, moving to a new city hoping geography will solve internal restlessness.
Sometimes this works out. Often, it just creates a new set of problems because you haven’t fully processed the transition you were in.
Other people will get uncomfortable too
Friends and family may start offering unsolicited advice, expressing concern, or seeming impatient with your situation. This usually says more about their own discomfort with uncertainty than about you. They care about you and want to “fix” your situation because watching someone navigate ambiguity triggers their own fears about not having control.
You don’t owe anyone a timeline for your transition.
The ending will be less dramatic than you imagine
We tend to fantasize about the moment when everything clicks into place—the triumphant new beginning, the clear resolution, the obvious sign that we’ve “made it” through to the other side.
In reality, the ending of most in-between stages is gradual and somewhat anticlimactic. One day you realize you haven’t felt that restless uncertainty in a while. You notice you’ve stopped checking job postings obsessively, or that you’ve gone a whole week without crying, or that this new city is starting to feel familiar.
The transition doesn’t end with a bang; it fades into a new normal so gradually you almost miss it.
How to survive (and even thrive) in the in-between
Accept where you are
This sounds simple but it’s perhaps the hardest work of all. Acceptance doesn’t mean you like your current situation or that you’ve given up on change. It means you stop fighting the reality that you’re in transition.
The constant mental resistance—the “I should be further along by now,” the “Everyone else has it figured out,” the “This should be easier”—takes enormous emotional energy. That energy could be redirected toward actually moving through the transition.
Try this: when you catch yourself in resistance, pause and say (out loud if you’re alone, internally if not): “Right now, I’m in an in-between stage, and that’s okay. This is where I am.”
Build structure when everything feels uncertain
When the big things in life are unclear, establish small certainties. Create routines that give your days shape. Make your bed. Go for a walk at the same time each day. Cook dinner. Call a friend on Thursdays.
These small rituals provide psychological anchor points when everything else is shifting. They remind you that you have agency, that you can create order in small ways even when the larger picture remains unclear.
Document the process
Keep a journal, take photos, save emails, record voice memos—whatever feels natural for you. Your future self will be grateful for these artifacts from your in-between time, and the act of documenting can help you process what you’re experiencing.
When you’re deep in the fog of transition, it’s hard to see that you’re moving at all. Looking back at entries from weeks or months ago can reveal progress that’s invisible in the day-to-day.
Find your people
Not everyone will understand what you’re going through, and that’s okay. But try to find at least one or two people who can sit with you in the uncertainty without trying to fix it or speed you through it.
These might be friends who’ve been through similar transitions. A therapist. An online community. A support group. People who understand that sometimes the most helpful thing they can say is: “This sounds really hard. I’m here.”
Let yourself grieve
In-between stages often involve loss—loss of your old identity, your previous certainty, the future you thought you’d have, the person you used to be. Even when you’re moving toward something better, it’s okay to mourn what’s ending.
Give yourself permission to feel sad, angry, scared, or confused. These emotions aren’t signs that you’re not handling the transition well; they’re signs that you’re processing something real.
Embrace the freedom
Here’s the secret gift of in-between stages: when you have nothing to lose and nothing to prove, you have permission to experiment.
Don’t have a clear career direction? Try things. Take the weird opportunity. Learn something just because it interests you. Say yes to invitations that don’t fit your old identity.
Rebuilding after a relationship ends? Discover who you are when you’re not defining yourself in relation to someone else. Do things the way you want to do them.
Recovering from illness? Notice what actually matters to you when the trivialities fall away.
In-between stages strip away the non-essentials and create space for you to rebuild intentionally rather than automatically replicating what was there before.
Practice patience as a skill
Our culture treats patience as a passive virtue—something you either have or don’t have. But patience is actually an active practice you can develop.
Each day in your in-between stage is an opportunity to practice staying present with discomfort, trusting process over immediate results, and choosing to believe that you’re exactly where you need to be even when it doesn’t feel that way.
This is advanced-level emotional work. Give yourself credit for showing up to it.
Resist the narrative that you’re stuck
“Stuck” implies stagnation, that nothing is happening. But in an in-between stage, enormous amounts are happening—most of it internal and invisible. You’re processing, integrating, growing, healing, learning, becoming.
You’re not stuck. You’re in process. These are fundamentally different states, even when they feel similar from the inside.
The view from the other side
When you eventually emerge from your in-between stage (and you will), you’ll likely look back with a complicated mix of emotions. Relief that it’s over. Pride that you made it through. Gratitude for what you learned. Maybe even nostalgia for certain aspects of that uncertain time.
You’ll probably also notice that you’ve changed in ways you didn’t expect. You’re more resilient than you knew. You have clearer boundaries. You’ve let go of things you thought were essential. You’ve discovered interests or capabilities you didn’t know you had.
Most importantly, you’ll have proof—hard-won, personal proof—that you can survive uncertainty. That you can sit with not knowing and come out okay on the other side.
This matters because life will hand you more in-between stages. We cycle through them repeatedly as we age, change, grow, lose, and rebuild. But each time through, you’ll have a little more faith in your ability to navigate the transition.
The in-between stages never become comfortable exactly, but they become familiar. You learn to recognize them as a natural part of being human rather than as personal failings or crises.
A final thought
If you’re in an in-between stage right now, please be gentle with yourself. You’re doing something harder than it looks: living without answers, trusting a process you can’t see, becoming someone new without a clear blueprint.
The world will keep asking you to explain yourself, to have a plan, to demonstrate progress in measurable ways. But the deepest work happens in the immeasurable spaces—the quiet mornings when you choose to keep going, the moments when you surprise yourself with unexpected resilience, the gradual softening as you accept where you are.
You’re not behind. You’re not failing. You’re not taking too long.
You’re exactly where countless humans before you have stood: in the messy, uncomfortable, sacred space between who you were and who you’re becoming.
And that’s exactly where transformation happens.
