The Messy Middle

I’ve been thinking about the messy middle: the place between knowing and becoming, where something has taken shape but hasn’t yet settled into certainty.

Wardrobe Rituals has brought me directly into that space.

I am deeply attached to this work. It reflects so much of what has shaped me: style as memory, mirror, archetype, play, ritual, connection. These are practices I have lived with long enough to have language for them. I can teach them. I can witness what happens when other people begin using them in their own lives.

And then there is everything around the work: the outreach, the asking, the business models, putting myself forward, figuring out how something intimate can sustain itself.

This is where things get sticky.

I have never been particularly comfortable showing the unfinished parts. Earlier in my life, uncertainty did not always feel safe. There was a need to appear confident, to know where I was going even when I didn’t.

Keep moving. Don’t expose the underbelly. Never let them see you sweat.

So the messy middle, rough, drafty, changing shape, is a real growing edge for me.

This year has made that especially clear. After moving back to the East Coast, I entered a life that feels more resourced and coherent. But safety has its own strange edginess. Sometimes when life becomes safer, the tender parts finally have enough room to emerge.

Recently I pulled a card from the Wild Unknown Archetypes deck that offered a simple message: you are already deeply loved.

It sounds almost embarrassingly simple, and yet I realized how much of my life was shaped by belief in the opposite.

As a child and adolescent, I was profoundly self-hating. Looking back, what I once understood as toughness or cynicism now looks more like the strategies of a frightened young person trying to secure control, safety, and belonging.

Turning forty, I feel as though life is beginning again, except this time I am arriving with resources I didn’t have before: experience, relationships, practices, mistakes, ancestors, teachers, friends, lovers.

Maybe the messy middle is not asking me to eliminate uncertainty, but to meet it differently.

Wardrobe Rituals began as a way of thinking about clothing, adornment, and the body as resources for knowing ourselves more deeply. But the practice keeps rippling outward. How we dress becomes how we inhabit ourselves, and how we inhabit ourselves becomes how we move through the world.

At some point, the practice begins asking things of your life.

For me, one of those questions is: What happens when I reach the edge of what I already know how to do?

I notice my avoidance there: procrastination, the hesitation before sending the email, the fear of asking, the instinct to pull back when something asks me to be visible before I feel ready.

I used to think a more aligned life might become increasingly frictionless. Now I wonder if alignment simply helps us recognize which friction is worth entering.

Some friction depletes us. Other friction is generative: the edge where we meet something unfamiliar and discover another part of ourselves.

That is where the messy middle lives for me.

I am learning while doing, making choices without knowing exactly what they will become, discovering my capacities as I reach for them. The work can be intentional and still be evolving. I can believe in it and still have questions. I can feel called toward something and still be scared of what it asks of me.

So I keep returning to devotion.

Not productivity, certainty, or even success exactly, but devotion: what am I trying to cultivate in myself? What am I honoring? What do I hold in my chest, my breath, my hands, my feet as I move forward?

Clarity does not always come first. Sometimes it is the devotion itself, the continuing, the tending, the willingness to stay in relationship with something unfinished, that creates the clarity.

For now, I am practicing staying with that unfinishedness and trusting the work without demanding that I already know its final form. There is so much I do not know, but I feel connected to what I care about, to the practices that return me to myself, and to the people who remind me who I am. Making, teaching, gathering, adorning, questioning, and witnessing have continued to lead me somewhere meaningful, even when I could not yet see where I was going.

Maybe that is enough of a compass: not a clear vision of the destination, but a way of knowing how I want to move toward it.

The messy middle asks me to keep going without pretending I can already see the other side.