Hello Reader!​

I love starting things and finishing things but I hate the in-between. That messy middle where you’re not sure if it’s all going to come together. The loose paper before that final tuck in origami. The last piece of hair that can’t be pinned down before the others. That thread you can’t tighten until all the stitches are in place. I HATE it. It’s why I don’t do crafts and almost cried the other night trying to help my son with an origami project for school. I don’t know if it’s the lack of tension in my hands due to hypermobility or if it’s just that feeling that if I screw up, everything’s going to fall apart. I do not function well in the in-between.

But it must be something I’m here to learn because I keep finding myself in it more and more. And maybe it comes with being a mom because there are threads you can’t pull tight without strangling someone. But I get the feeling it’s not only parents that feel the squeeze of waiting in the uncertainty right now. Everyone around me feels like they are holding the collective breath with me.

So I did some research. How can I find calm, peace, or even happiness in the in-between? Because I can’t keep living like this. And I don’t want to look up and realize I wished some of the best parts away too fast. Here’s what I found.

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The in-between is not a small category. It is the week between the test and the results. The months between the application and the answer. The stretch after someone we love gets a diagnosis and before anyone knows what it means. The relationship that has not been named yet. The house that has not sold. The kid who is almost okay. The parent who is slowly not.

This is actually most of life. The starts and the finishes are the short parts.

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Feel

We're Simply Waiting

Our bodies read unresolved as unsafe. That is reasonable design, since for most of human history an unresolved situation genuinely was dangerous. The trouble is that the body cannot tell the difference between a threat and a delay, so a pending result and an actual emergency produce a similar feeling in the chest.

So the first thing that helps is accuracy. Instead of a vague sense that something is wrong, we can name what is actually true: I am in the middle of something unfinished, and nothing has happened yet. The woman refreshing her email for a job answer is not in danger. She is in a queue. Her body is behaving as though those are the same, and saying the accurate sentence out loud gives it something more precise to work with.

Let the surge run its 90 seconds

The phone buzzes and we look. The portal updates. Our teenager is forty minutes late and has not texted back. There is a physical wave that comes with each of those, and Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s research suggests the chemistry of it runs about 90 seconds if we stop re-triggering it.

We re-trigger it by checking again. And again. The checking feels like managing the situation and it is actually how we keep the wave from ever completing. One hand on the chest, breathe out longer than in, and let it finish before we look at anything.

Put it in your hands and feet

Uncertainty lives upward, in the head and chest, in the part of us that runs scenarios. The furthest point from all that is the floor.

Hospital waiting rooms, carpool lines, the kitchen at 2am. Pressing both feet down and feeling actual pressure interrupts the scenario loop, because the body is reporting on the present and the present is almost always less dramatic than the forecast.

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Change

Not knowing costs more than bad news

This finding reorganized how I think about waiting. Archy de Berker and colleagues published a study in Nature Communications in 2016 where people were told they might receive a mild electric shock. The researchers tracked stress through pupil dilation and sweat response, and found that stress peaked when the chance of the shock was around fifty percent. People waiting at a coin flip were more stressed than people who knew for certain the shock was coming.

Uncertainty is harder on the body than a confirmed bad outcome. Which means the exhaustion of the in-between is not us being dramatic or weak. It is the correct physiological response to an unresolved question, and it is more expensive than the answer would be, even a bad answer.

Intolerance of uncertainty is a skill

Michel Dugas and his colleagues have spent decades studying what they call intolerance of uncertainty, and it turns out to be one of the stronger predictors of chronic worry. Some of us genuinely have less of this tolerance than others, partly by temperament and partly by what we lived through.

The useful part is that it responds to practice. Tolerance for not knowing grows the way most capacities grow, through repeated small exposure that does not overwhelm us. Every time we sit in an unresolved thing without resolving it artificially, the capacity gets slightly larger. This is what I'm working on so maybe I can hate it less.

Prudence with no ceiling

A lot of us meet uncertainty by managing it, which looks responsible from the outside. We research every possible diagnosis. We plan for both outcomes in detail. We rehearse the hard conversation eleven times.

Prudence is a real virtue and nobody has ever been warned they were too prepared. That missing ceiling is where it stops helping. At some point the planning is no longer reducing risk, it is just how we avoid feeling the not-knowing, and it costs us the hours we spend doing it.

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Build

Pleasure in Not Knowing

Uncertainty makes good things last

Timothy Wilson and colleagues published a study in 2005 where participants received flattering notes and, in one condition, could not tell which specific person had written which. The people left uncertain stayed in the good mood significantly longer than the people who knew.

Not knowing extends pleasure. We have all felt this version of it: the early weeks of something romantic before it has a name, the unopened envelope, being eight years old on Christmas Eve (or, ya know, 45!) The same mechanism that makes the hard in-between so heavy is what makes the hopeful one delicious.

Which means we can add one. Most weeks already have a few open questions we are actually rooting for, and the frightening one is just louder. Whether the bulbs we planted in September come up. Whether our kid makes the team. How the novel we are halfway through ends. If nothing like that is running, we can start something: plant something, order the seeds, text the friend about the trip in January, sign up for the thing in February. The scary pending thing does not go away. We get a second pending thing we want the answer to, and the week stops being made of only the one we are braced against.

Then try the opposite and finish something small on purpose

When the large thread cannot be pulled tight, the whole system feels unfinished. One deliberate completion gives our brain the closure it is looking for, somewhere it can actually have it.

One drawer. One thank-you note that has been owed since August. One book finished rather than four started. The size does not matter and the completion does.

Name the first step in both futures, then stop

For the big pending thing, decide one action for the yes and one action for the no. Write both down. Then put the planning down entirely, because it is finished.

This gives the Controller in us something true: we have prepared. We are not caught off guard in either direction. The rehearsing after that point is not preparation anymore, and we are allowed to stop.

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Remember in origami to the fact that the loose paper is not a mistake in the process. It is the part where the thing is still becoming what it will be. The tuck only works because the paper was loose first.

Most of our lives are the loose part. If we only exhale at the starts and the finishes, we are holding our breath through nearly all of it, and some of those unresolved stretches will turn out to have been the best parts. The not knowing is often where the hoping lives.

I do not love the in-between yet. Far from it. But I am learning to stop treating it as something to survive on the way to somewhere safer.

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What are you waiting on right now? Hit reply and tell me, even if it is something small.

Have a lovely day! - Kate