Stuck Between Two Lives

FADE IN:

INT. CAR - SCHOOL PARKING LOT - MORNING

Some mornings I sit in my car before work, both hands on the wheel like I’m about to parallel park my whole existence, and think: this is not it. This was never it. 

Nothing has happened. That’s the humiliating part. No overturned car, no building on fire, no stranger sprinting toward me with terrible news. Doors open around me. Colleagues emerge, coffee cups held like tiny trophies. Everyone walks toward the sign-in sheet, exchanging “good mornings.” 

In the wide shot, I am a professional woman who arrives on time. Push in to an extreme close-up, and something feral is pacing the perimeter, testing the doorknobs. 

I love a new notebook as much as anyone, but I don’t need a better planner. I don’t want another Sunday-night ritual that hides dread under my moisturizer and red light therapy mask. What I want is simpler and harder to put on a calendar: I want room in my life for more than obligation. I want to find out who I might become if most of my hours weren’t already spoken for. 

ACT ONE: The Long Take -

The Life I Can't Leave, and the Life I Can’t Yet Start 

Family therapist Pauline Boss coined a term for grief without closure: ambiguous loss. I’d stretch it to cover this — being suspended between a life you can no longer inhabit and a future you cannot yet enter. For me, nothing is officially over, but my spirit has already checked out. 

When grief has nowhere to go, it changes costume. It becomes anxiety that arrives before the coffee. A heaviness that settles in every Sunday at 4 p.m., right on schedule. Midnight browser tabs full of coastal real estate in places where the dollar stretches further. A shrinking tolerance for noise, for minor inconveniences, for things that used to pass through me like weather and now lodge like a splinter. 

We call it research, preparation, planning for what comes next. Sometimes it’s just grief, looking for an exit sign. 

This is why "stuck" feels so emotionally confusing. Nothing has technically died, so we don’t grant ourselves the dignity of mourning it. We brush the exhaustion off as something we could fix if we were just a little more disciplined about exercise, nutrition, and bedtime. 

ACT TWO: Split Screen 

The Spreadsheet Says No. The Soul Says How Much Longer 

On paper, the logic is airtight. Retiring early is financial heresy. There are years left to log, a future self who will need groceries when inflation outpaces optimism. Then the steady drip of everything else: calls from the kids, car repairs, vet bills. The spreadsheet’s verdict fits into two vise-grip words: Not yet. 

My soul, who has never once balanced a checkbook, asks: how much longer, exactly, do you expect me to sit in this waiting room? 

I want to be clear — this isn’t an argument for financial recklessness. Rent is real. Roofs leak on a schedule that has nothing to do with your personal growth. But there is also the survival of the spirit — the part of you that gets quietly malnourished when every meaningful desire is deferred to a year you’re not even guaranteed to reach. That cost doesn’t show up on a retirement projection. It shows up somewhere much less official. 

CUT TO: 

Anger Is Just Grief That Finally Stood Up 

There’s anger about years spent holding things together for people who will likely never fully clock what that cost. There’s anger at systems that expect everybody to wear down at the exact same rate, like we’re all the same make and model. And there’s a special, almost comedic cruelty in the timing: right around the age when a woman finally knows exactly what she wants and what she won’t tolerate anymore, the culture starts calling her invisible. 

Of course there’s anger. 

T

he danger isn’t the anger itself — it’s turning it inward and deciding we ruined our own lives. That’s where grief starts sliding toward depression, which is sneaky about where it moves the wound. Grief says, I miss the life I had before things changed. I miss the life I might have lived had I taken a right instead of a left. Depression whispers, it’s too late to live the life you truly desire. Those are not the same sentences, and it matters enormously which one you’re listening to at 2 a.m. 

Don’t Let the Years Turn Into a Hallway 

Here’s the real risk in waiting seven to nine years: it’s

not that time passes—time was always going to pass. The risk is that those years quietly turn into a hallway. No comfortable chairs. No art on the walls worth pausing for. You keep your coat on the whole time, convinced your real life is about to start any minute now. 

But seven to nine years is too long to stand in an empty hallway in your coat.

So the work isn’t pretending I don’t want what I want — I’ve tried that; it just makes the wanting louder. And it isn’t detonating my financial future in the name of authenticity, hoping enlightenment covers the mortgage. It doesn’t. I checked. 

The actual work is refusing to treat freedom as a single dramatic event — a finish line I either cross or don’t. I might not be able to leave entirely yet. But I can stop abandoning myself while I’m still here. 

ACT THREE: Magic Hour 

Filling the Balloon

A what-if scenario is a loop: you run it at midnight and end up right where you started. A balloon is filled. You don’t need to leap into a new life. You lay it down, one breath of fire at a time. 

One appointment made. One expense understood. One boundary drawn and actually held. One creative project treated like it’s real, because it is. One morning a week that belongs to the writer, and only the writer. One week somewhere else — not to escape, but to watch, quietly, who I become when the usual machinery finally shuts off. One small yes to the woman I’m becoming — not someday, but every day. 

The question is no longer "How do I outrun this feeling?" It becomes: what is this feeling asking me to stop abandoning, and what is it asking me to fill, to build?

SMASH CUT:

EXT. BALLOON FIESTA PARK - ALBUQUERQUE, NM - PRE-DAWN

It’s dark and crisp; I’m in a field with thousands of strangers, holding my coffee like one of those tiny trophies. Same prop. Completely different scene. 

Before the sun comes up, the Dawn Patrol pilots fire their burners, and the balloons glow from the inside, giant lanterns breathing in the dark.

A balloon has no steering wheel, nothing like the one I grip every morning in the parking lot. What a pilot can do is change altitude. On the right mornings, the low winds blow one way; the higher winds blow the other. Rise, and you drift one direction. Drop, and you drift back. Locals call it the Albuquerque Box. 

I can’t steer my way out of the next stretch. The wind is the wind. Bills are the wind. But I can change altitude. I can choose which current I’m riding on a given Tuesday. I can rise into the part of my life that moves toward the writer, then come back down to the field where the paycheck lives, and still be traveling. Still be flying. 

The Life Before the Life 

I still don’t know exactly when the door opens. I know there are financial realities longing alone can’t dissolve. But I also know I cannot spend the next several years telling myself my real life starts later, on a release date I’m not even guaranteed to see. 

I’ve lived long enough to know later is not a country anyone gets a confirmed reservation for. 

So I’m building the life before the life. The imperfect version. The rough cut. The Tuesday-evening version, scribbled in margins and carried around in notebooks and protected in small, stubborn increments of stolen time — where rest isn’t a reward I have to collapse to earn, where anger gets to speak without being handed the car keys, where grief gets called grief instead of filed under personal defect. 

SLOW DISSOLVE:

Someday I may wake up somewhere else — light moving across an unfamiliar wall, a half-finished manuscript on the table, no bell telling me my time belongs to somebody else today. 

I don’t want that woman, the one on the other side of the window, looking back at me with pity because I sacrificed every present moment just to reach her doorstep. I want her to recognize me. I want her to know that even while I was waiting, I already started. 

FADE OUT.

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If you’re stuck between two lives too — the one you can’t leave and the one you can’t yet start — tell me in the comments: what’s one board you laid this week? If this found you on Sunday at 4 p.m., send it to someone else standing in the hallway.