built for in-between places
on my yes year, airports at 6am, and never living the same year twice
i’m sitting in an airport lounge at 6am and i realized something about myself that i think i’ve always known but never said out loud. i really enjoy being alone in public places. not lonely, alone. there’s a difference. surrounded by strangers who are all mid-motion, all going somewhere they haven’t been yet, and i’m one of them, and nobody needs anything from me, and for a few minutes the entire map of my life feels open again.
i think i’m a certain type of person. and i think there are others out there who are like me. people who are in love with in-between places.
airport terminals when the light is still strange and grey and the coffee is bad but it doesn’t matter because you’re about to be somewhere new. hotel lobbies where no one knows your name and no one needs to. the corner seat at a bar in a neighborhood you’ll probably never come back to. the deep interior of a book that cracks something open in your chest and then closes, and you’re different now but the world around you hasn’t changed at all.
these are pass-through places. transit spaces. you were never supposed to build a life inside them. but something about them makes certain people feel more awake than almost anything else.
i want to be clear. i’ve lived in austin for nine years. i’m not someone who’s always halfway out the door. i have my coffee shop. i have my running route. i have the people i call when something good happens and the people i call when something falls apart. i am, in a lot of ways, a person who loves routine. who craves it, even.
but i’ve also never lived the same year twice.
when i was twenty-two, i moved to new york city for a full year. i was doing a co-op at an architecture firm and i had no idea what i was doing, which turned out to be the entire point. i called it my yes year. i said yes to everything. every event, every happy hour, every “you should come” from someone i barely knew. i said yes so many times and so indiscriminately that i ended up in a helicopter to upstate new york once. someone offered me a last-minute bib to the new york city marathon and i ran my first marathon having barely trained for it. i still don’t fully understand how half of that year happened. but i understand the principle behind it. luck is just exposure plus effort stretched over long enough timelines. you say yes enough times in enough rooms and eventually something extraordinary walks through the door.
that year rewired something in me. not because new york was better than austin or because i wanted to leave my life behind. but because it showed me what happens when you stop filtering the world through a plan and start letting it in. new york is, at its core, an in-between city. people talk about it like a destination but almost nobody stays. you come for a few years, maybe five, maybe less. you have days that look nothing like the day before. and then one morning you leave and the city fills the space you left like water closing over a stone. it doesn’t need you to stay. that was never the arrangement.
and i think that quality, that impermanence, is what made it feel so alive.
i came back to austin because i had one semester left at UT and i had to graduate. that’s the unsexy version. the real version is that my heart was still in new york and coming back to a smaller city felt like learning to breathe in a room with lower ceilings. but here’s what i’ve found to be true about people, and maybe especially about this type of person. we are remarkably good at adapting when we have no other choice. not because we’re tough in some gritty motivational poster way. but because the same part of us that craves new rooms and open maps is the same part that knows how to walk into an unfamiliar version of our own life and make it work.
i built a life here that i love. but i’ve never been someone who closes the door on movement, on change, on the possibility that this chapter might look completely different from the last one. nine years in the same city and not a single repeated year. my career has shapeshifted, my friendships have deepened and expanded, and i keep showing up to the same familiar places as a slightly different version of myself and seeing them with new eyes.
if there’s one thing i know for sure, it’s that the plan never goes as planned.
if covid taught me anything, is that the idea of a fixed trajectory is a fiction we tell ourselves because uncertainty is uncomfortable. we make five-year plans and ten-year plans and we hold onto them like guardrails. and then the world shifts under our feet and the only people who come through it well are the ones who already knew how to move.
adaptability is the superpower. not the backup plan. the actual, primary, first-string superpower.
i think there are people who find one life and love it. who wake up every morning grateful for the sameness, the steadiness, the deep roots. i respect that so much. but i think there’s another kind of person. the kind who plants roots and still lets the wind move through them, who builds a home but keeps the windows open, who finds comfort in routine but refuses to let routine become a ceiling.
the kind who is always a little bit haunted by all the other lives they could still live. not in a restless way or in a running-away way but rather a frequency. a door that stays cracked because closing it all the way has never felt right.
some people are meant to stay in one place. and some of us are meant to stay in one place while still living like we’re passing through. eyes open. bags half packed in some metaphorical sense. saying yes to the thing that doesn’t fit the blueprint
if you asked me what i’m looking for, i’d probably go quiet for a second. not because i don’t know. but because the answer doesn’t sound the way people expect it to. i’m not trying to arrive somewhere. i never have been.
transformation has always felt both beautiful and gut wrenching to me. and i think that tension is what keeps us alive. when i was younger i used to get so upset when things didn’t go my way or the way i had planned. my mom once told me, “you know a heartbeat? it goes up and down. otherwise we’d be dead.” and that stuck with me forever.
the ups and downs aren’t the obstacle. they’re the proof that you’re still becoming. and the willingness to keep moving, evolving, and saying yes is what makes the staying feel chosen rather than inherited. i don’t think that’s restlessness, it’s the truest kind of presence. choosing your life over and over again, every single year, instead of choosing it once and coasting.
i think this is true about love too. the best relationships aren’t the ones where you fall in love once and ride it out. they’re the ones where you fall in love with the same person over and over again as they change, because they will change. you will never meet one single version of someone. and you will hopefully never stay in one single version of yourself. the people who love well are the ones who keep choosing each other through every new iteration. that’s not instability. that’s the deepest kind of commitment there is. staying, not because nothing has changed, but because you keep choosing to be there as everything does.
if you’ve ever felt most alive in a place you were just passing through, or in a year that looked nothing like the one before it, or in the moment right before everything changed.
then maybe you’re a doorway person too.
and maybe that’s not something to fix, it’s just something to finally call by its name.
