The transformational coach and poet Nancy Levin wrote a line I keep coming back to: "Honor the space between no longer and not yet." It's stayed with me because it names something most of us experience constantly and almost never give ourselves permission to sit in — that uncomfortable middle ground where you've left the old version of yourself behind but haven't quite arrived as the new one.
If you're feeling stuck right now, I'd gently suggest you might not be stuck at all. You might be mid-transformation, and simply judging yourself for not being finished yet.
Nothing in Life Is Actually Static
We have a habit of treating change as an event — something that happens, concludes, and then leaves us in a new steady state. But look at almost anything closely and you'll find it's in constant flux.
I had a conversation with my neighbour about this recently. It was a glorious day, properly feeling like summer, and he was loving it. Then he checked the forecast, saw cooler weather coming, and his mood turned. "Why can't it just stay like this?"
Because weather doesn't do that. No two days are identical — the temperature, the wind direction, the cloud cover all shift. Even within a single day, it's changing continuously. Rain doesn't fall at one steady rate all afternoon; it varies in pace and volume. Here in Sydney we're moving through spring into summer, and spring is flux by definition: warm days, cool days, runs of each. Even summer has early dry heat and later humid heat, with cool days scattered through.
Your environment is never still, and your energy moves with it. When the sun's out, most of us feel more energised. On darker, cooler days, there's simply less to draw on. That's not a personal failing. It's you responding to conditions.
The Career Version: New Title, Old Job
Here's where this shows up at work. You get the promotion. On paper you're no longer the old role — you're the new one. But for weeks or months you're doing both. You're still being pulled back to cover the thing you used to own, while simultaneously learning the new role from the person who had it and the people around you.
And in that gap, almost everyone feels like a fraud. The title says you should be performing at this level, and you can see very clearly that you're not there yet. That's the no-longer-and-not-yet space. The mistake is treating it as evidence of inadequacy rather than as the ordinary texture of transition.
The Health Version: Progress Isn't a Clean Break
This is the one I see most in my clinic. Someone comes in and says, "I've been eating badly for months, I feel terrible, I want to get healthy again." They're ready to let go of the old habits and embrace new ones. Wonderful.
Then, three weeks in, they slip. And they don't treat it as a slip — they treat it as proof that the whole thing has failed.
But that's not how change works. You don't cleanly abandon the old and arrive at the new, never to revisit. You carry parts of the old with you while you build on the parts of the new. There will be harder days and days with more temptation in them. Honouring the space means accepting that the goal isn't perfection — it's making more healthy decisions than unhealthy ones, and letting that ratio shift in your favour over time.
That's incremental transformation, and it is genuinely how durable change happens.
The Money Version: Surplus Months and Deficit Months
The same pattern runs through finances. You notice the money's dwindling and decide to manage it better. But you can't simply stop spending — financial health isn't a destination either.
Your outgoings will creep up over time whether you like it or not: inflation, a new commitment, kids, a pet, the house needing work. Running a business is the same. You'll have months with a healthy surplus and then a month where income drops and costs don't. A household budget behaves identically.
The question isn't whether you'll ever have a deficit month. You will. The question is whether, over a longer window, you have more surplus months than deficit ones. Honour the space you're in on that journey instead of writing off the whole project because of one bad month.
The Relationship Version: What Comes With You
Relationships move through this too. A relationship ends, and you're looking for something new — a better relationship with yourself, or with someone else. You want to honour that transition. But things from the old one keep surfacing. Someone in the street reminds you of them. A pattern repeats.
Here's the part I think matters most. There will be traits in yourself that you want to leave behind — things you saw in the old relationship and decided were the problem. And those traits tend to come with you. Not because you've failed to change, but because they're part of you.
What helps isn't wishing them gone. It's getting curious about what they are and how they've served you, rather than treating them as a defect. Because if you've decided a trait is shameful, you'll keep spotting it in other people and feeling bad about yourself every time. Embracing it — understanding it, working with it — is what actually takes the charge out of it.
Accepting Where You Are, Not Where You Wish You Were
The core of this is acceptance of your current position in the transformation. Not wishing you were nearer the "not yet," not wishing you were further from the "no longer." Being where you are, and finding what's good about it.
I'm on this constantly with my own health. I'm always looking for incremental gains, and they don't arrive overnight. They arrive over a timescale I can't predict — and by the time they do, I'm usually in some new phase anyway.
It's worth making peace with the fact that you never fully arrive. Something new will always come along and disturb your equilibrium. But notice what that means: every time you solve a problem, the next set of problems you face is a level up — and you now have more tools and resources to meet them. That's not life being unfair. That's growth.
Key Takeaways
- Feeling stuck is often just being mid-transition — the gap between no longer and not yet is a real, normal place to be.
- Nothing around you is static, from the weather to your energy levels; expecting steadiness sets you up for frustration.
- A slip back into old habits isn't failure. Aim for more good decisions than poor ones over time, not an unbroken streak.
- Judge your finances and your health over a longer window — surplus months outnumbering deficit months is the real measure.
- Traits you want to leave behind usually travel with you. Understanding them works better than wishing them away.
- New problems appearing after you solve old ones is a sign of growth, not of going backwards.
This is a big part of how I work with people at me&my wellness. A lot of what looks like a willpower problem is really someone being hard on themselves for not having finished a transition that was always going to take time. When we look at the whole picture — your food, your sleep, your movement, your stress, your relationships and the story you're telling yourself about all of it — the pressure usually comes off, and progress gets easier.
So if you're in the in-between right now, you're not behind. You're in the part where the change is actually being made.
Want to go deeper on this? Book a free 30-minute discovery call with Anthony at meandmywellness.com.au