This Is Why Mid-Becoming Exists
For the woman who is tired of watching everyone perform their healing while she's actually in the middle of hers.
There’s a drive to work I think about a lot.
Sitting in traffic, running the same sentence on a loop that I had stopped believing in a long time ago: No job is perfect. Everything has its pros and cons. Focus on the pros.
And underneath the reasonable adult self-talk, I was doomscrolling at red lights. Spending more time than I’d like to admit shamefully hating on the pages of people I went to school with. It wasn’t because I wanted their specific lives, but because watching them move freely through their days made me bitter.
I was daydreaming about small things.
Waking up when my body was ready instead of when an obnoxiously loud alarm told me to. Going on a morning walk just because I wanted to. Cooking a fresh meal instead of scarfing down the 3-day-old Sunday meal prep I squeezed in while already dreading the week that hadn't started yet. A life that existed outside of 6pm to 10pm.
That was the whole dream. And I couldn’t even let myself want it out loud without immediately feeling embarrassed or talking myself out of it.
That’s not realistic. Everyone lives like this. You’re being dramatic. At least you have a job.
My desires weren’t the problem. That voice saying those things was. And I spent years not knowing the difference.
If you've ever said any version of those thoughts to yourself, this space is for you.
Why I started this
I’ll be honest with you about why this exists, because I think you deserve that from the jump.
I got sick of watching people perform their healing.
You know what I’m talking about... The matching yoga sets. The aesthetically arranged self-help books that are probably tied to a brand deal. The videos of someone meditating, which genuinely kind of defeats the purpose. The before-and-after stories where the struggle gets a two-second mention before they skip straight to the version of themselves that has it figured out.
Listen, I like aesthetics too. Love them! I’m not immune to a well-curated feed. But there is a version of this kind of personal growth content online that has a serious issue with honesty. It shows you the destination and glosses over everything that actually happens on the way there. And when you’re in the thick of it (actually in it, not performing being in it), that gap between what you’re seeing online and what you’re living feels deeply isolating.
Because the real version of healing and building something new is not aesthetic. It’s rough. You struggle with discipline. You feel lazy when you’re actually just depleted. You feel delusional for wanting what you want. You feel unworthy of the progress you’re trying to make. You watch people who seem to fly past you and wonder what is wrong with you that this is so hard. Nobody films that part.
I wanted to document this because it has been very hard, and I am still in it. As much as I would love to blink myself into the version of my life where I’ve “made it” (whatever that means), I’m not there yet.
And I think there’s something more valuable in writing from here, from the middle, than waiting until I have the polished version of my story to share.
That’s what Mid-Becoming means to me, and hopefully for you too.
Who this is for
You, if you’ve Googled “why do I keep self-sabotaging” at 11 pm, read the articles that popped up, understood them intellectually, and still woke up the next morning doing the exact same thing. You are high-achieving on paper and privately exhausted in a way that has nothing to do with how hard you are working. You have a life that looks fine from the outside, maybe even impressive, and you can’t bring yourself to explain why it feels like someone else’s.
Maybe you are just starting to recognize that something is off, but you can’t explain it yet. You have searched things like “feeling stuck in life” and “why do I hate my job even though it pays well,” and found a hundred answers that didn’t quite land.
Maybe you are further along: already doing the shadow work, asking what the younger version of you needed, and understanding how she has been making and overriding your decisions for years.
Maybe you can see the aligned choice clearly and are terrified to make it anyway. Or maybe you are in the early days of learning what it feels like to keep promises to yourself and figuring out who you actually are when you stop performing the version of yourself that everyone else needed you to be.
What you’ll find here
Most of the women who find this publication are somewhere on the same road, just at different points on it. For some, the fog has lifted enough to see that the life they built doesn’t feel right anymore, but not enough to see what comes next. If that is where you are, a lot of the writing here begins with self-sabotage patterns— why you keep choosing against yourself, what the patterns are actually protecting you from, and how to see them clearly enough to start interrupting them before it costs you another year.
Some are ready to go deeper than the pattern itself, into where it came from. That means looking at the younger version of you — what she needed that she didn’t get, how she built a set of rules for staying safe, and how those rules impact your life directly. The shadow work and inner child work that lives here isn’t the polished kind you’ll find on Instagram. It is the kind that requires you to sit with something uncomfortable long enough to actually understand it, and that understanding is what makes change possible in a way that sticks.
The risk-taking that gets written about here isn’t purely motivational. Of course, we all love to feel motivated, and that is part of it… But when I talk about risk-taking, it’s specific, incremental, and oftentimes uncomfortable. Tackling it from that perspective is truly the only thing that actually moves the needle when you have spent years choosing the safe version of everything.
And some are in the early days of what comes after ALL of that: building something that is genuinely theirs. That season gets written about here, and it’s what we’re all striving for. Right?
But I’ve gone through enough to know that it’s not as clean or as triumphant as it sounds from the outside, and it deserves honesty as much as any of the harder ones do.
All of it is here. Essays are published every Thursday.
Where to Go From Here
The essays live here on Substack, but if you’re looking for something to actually work with, the tools live at midbecoming.com. Right now, that means one thing: the Self-Sabotage Pattern Breaker Workbook. But the work covered in this publication spans more than one pattern and more than one season of rebuilding. The tools will follow that arc as this grows.
If you’re not sure where you are in that arc yet, the free quiz is the place to start.
→ Take the Self-Sabotage Style Quiz here.
And if this resonated, send it to someone who needed to hear that the middle is allowed to be messy. That’s the whole point of this.
Ps. I don’t take that drive I described at the start of this article anymore. It’s not because I figured everything out, but because I finally stopped waiting for permission to want something different.
The blooms featured in the above video are from my morning walks, which I take every morning, without rushing or needing to report to any specific place or person.
On the other side of the healing but YES, I wouldn’t have filmed it lol There were a lot of crying naps in the middle of the day, walks with the dog listening to self help podcasts, laying on my couch covered in blankets watching movie after movie to numb my mind. I also did the typical list of the “healing toolkit”: cook, yoga, gym, journal, paint. But it wasn’t aesthetic at all haha I am glad you are writing about this!