Why is the in-between the hardest part?

The short answer: **the in-between is hard because it is the only part of a change that contains no evidence.** Behind you, something that worked and has stopped. Ahead, something that has not begun. In the middle, only a decision you made a while ago and cannot currently verify.

Almost everybody who abandons a change abandons it here, and almost nobody abandons it because they reconsidered.

It is not a delay, it is a place

The instinct is to treat the middle as dead time — get through it, hurry it, apologise for it. That is why it is unbearable: you are living somewhere while refusing to admit you live there.

In every account of transition that is worth anything, the middle has its own work. It is where the old identity actually finishes, which does not happen at the moment of decision. You decide in a day and you stop being that person over about a year, and the year is not wasted time, it is the thing itself.

What makes it feel like failure

Three things arrive together and reinforce each other.

You are worse at everything, because you have left the domain you were competent in. You have nothing to say when people ask what you do. And you cannot point at progress, because the progress is subtraction and subtraction is invisible.

None of those is evidence about whether you were right. They are all just descriptions of being between two things, and they would be present whether the decision was brilliant or catastrophic — which is precisely why they cannot be used to judge it, though everybody uses them to.

What to hold on to instead

Not confidence. Confidence is not available here and pretending otherwise is exhausting.

Hold on to the reason. Write down, on the day you decide, why you are doing it and what you expect to be true afterwards — and read it in month five, not as motivation but as testimony from somebody who had information you have temporarily lost access to.

And pick one thing that is not the transition: a routine, a body, a person, one piece of ordinary competence. The middle is survivable when not all of you is in it.

How long

Longer than you planned, and the honest answer is that nobody can give you a number. What can be said is that it ends, and it usually ends without announcement — one day you notice you have not thought about the old thing for a fortnight.

Where this is in the book

*Into the Wild* is the tenth scene of chapter two and it is exactly this: everything familiar behind, nothing arrived, and a great deal of walking.