The Messy Middle: What It's Like to Write Before You Have the Ending

Day 257 of a 365-day commitment to show up and write my truth

A few days ago I wrote about being blindsided by someone. I didn't share the details, and I'm still not going to. What I will tell you is this: writing that post didn't fix anything. I hit publish, closed the laptop, and sat right back down inside the thing I still didn't understand.

Nobody warns you about that part of writing your life out loud. You don't get to wait until you've worked it all out first. You write the messy middle, you post it, and then you keep living in that same messy middle — except now, people have read it with you.

I think about the coaches who shaped me the most, and not one of them showed up with a tidy answer for everything. They pulled from their own lives. They said, plainly, here's what I got wrong, and here's what I'm still figuring out, and let that honesty do the teaching instead of pretending they'd already arrived somewhere I hadn't. I've never wanted to be the version of me who only shows up once the bow is tied on top. So today isn't an ending. It's just an update, from somewhere in the middle.

What's Gotten a Little Clearer From the Messy Middle

I haven't resolved anything, not fully. But something in me has softened around it, just a little.

I keep coming back to an idea about polarity — that most people aren't simply good or simply bad, but some mix of both, living in different rooms of the same house. Let me say the first part loudly, though, so there's no confusion: evil is real. I'm not here to dress it up as a misunderstanding or a bad day. It exists, plainly and painfully, and I have zero interest in explaining it away. But for most of us, most of the time, the real question isn't whether we're a good person or a bad one. It's what we choose to do with the parts of ourselves we'd rather not look at.

Because we all have a shadow. The anger we swallow instead of speaking. The choice we made and never told a soul about. The version of us that shows up when no one's watching and nothing's on the line. Having that shadow was never the problem. What actually shapes a person is what happens next — whether you let it stay buried and keep performing the version of yourself everyone expects, or whether you do the shadow work: turn toward it on purpose, even though it's humbling, even though hiding would honestly be so much easier. That doesn't mean broadcasting it to the world. It just means being honest with yourself about it, and choosing, from there, where you go next.

That question wasn't only about the person who blindsided me. It landed on me too, the moment I asked myself if I've ever done the same thing — kept something tucked away in the dark because the light felt like more than I could survive.

I don't have a clean answer. Maybe I'm not supposed to yet.

Writing Through It, Not After It

This blog was never meant to be a highlight reel of lessons I'd already mastered. It was always supposed to be me, writing through my actual life — the parenting, the business, the moving, the grief, the growth — while I'm still standing in the middle of it. Not the polished version I'd tell you a year from now. Not the one with a neat three-step takeaway at the bottom.

Some days that looks like writing about a September that didn't go the way I'd planned. Some days it looks like writing about someone who wasn't who I thought they were, before I even know what I'm going to do about it. And some days, like today, it just looks like showing up on Day 257 and admitting I don't have the ending yet.

Every so often I go back and read my earliest posts, and I cringe — genuinely, toes-curling, hide-behind-a-pillow cringe. I wasn't well health-wise back then, and honestly, it shows. Some of those first posts read like an Instagram caption someone stretched a little too far — a brain dump of whatever I was feeling that day, dressed up just enough to hit publish. If you know what to look for, you can trace the better days and the harder ones right through them. There are posts where I'm clearly coaching myself the way I'd coach a client through something hard. There are posts where you can tell I was just trying something new to see if it would hold. Some of it works. Some of it makes me want to reach through the screen and hug that version of me. I don't take any of it down, though, cringe and all. Every single one of those posts is real, and every one of them was me — exactly where I was, on that day, with what I had. I'll write more about that chapter eventually, what wasn't well and what that actually looked like from the inside. Not today. But I won't pretend it isn't part of the record either.

I used to think being trustworthy meant being certain. I don't think that anymore. Now I think it might mean being honest about the not-knowing — telling you where I actually am, clearer than I was but still not resolved, still deciding how much light I'm ready to shine on my own shadows, instead of performing a healed I haven't earned yet.

And here's the part that actually gets me, the part I didn't expect when I sat down to write this: I'm not doing any of it alone. People reach out and tell me a post found them exactly when they needed it — mid-mess, no ending in sight, same as me. That's the whole thing, isn't it? None of us actually know how the story ends. We're just lucky enough, every once in a while, to be in the messy middle of it together.

So that's today's truth. Not wrapped up. Not fixed. Just written, out loud, the way I promised myself I would.

About the Author | Day 257 of 365

I'm a soul-led coach, entrepreneur, mother, and recovering perfectionist, currently navigating healing, uncertainty, temporary chapters, motherhood, work, big transitions, grief, nervous system healing, overstimulation, emotional growth, and the ongoing lesson that life works a whole lot better when we stop trying to carry everything alone. Some days that healing looks finished. Today it just looks honest — and I'm learning that's more than enough.

Day 257 of 365. Come back tomorrow — I'm still going. 🐧