A few days ago, I stubbed my toe on the vacuum cleaner.
It was parked at the end of the couch, sticking halfway into the walkway between the living room and the kitchen. Because apparently that’s where vacuums live now.
I hopped on one foot and demanded answers from my completely innocent husband.
“How can there still be so much stuff in this apartment after we’ve gotten rid of a ton? And why did you leave the vacuum THERE?”
He blinked at me.
He had not, in fact, created the chaos. The move did. But frustration doesn’t care about facts. It just finds the nearest available target, and on that particular evening, the nearest available target was a man quietly minding his own business.
Here’s what I actually tripped over: the middle.
Packing up after 11 years in the same apartment to becoming nomadic. And nobody warns you about this part. The middle of a move looks worse than the beginning. Way worse. Boxes everywhere. Things you swore you donated, still here. The vacuum out in the way because we keep needing it.
By all appearances, we’ve made everything worse.
We haven’t. It only looks worse because it’s in process.
Every meaningful transition has this stage. Moves. Manuscripts. Reinventions. There’s always a stretch where it looks like you’ve gone backward, where you start wondering if you should have started at all. That’s not a warning sign. It’s a mile marker.
Clearing happens in layers. You let go of one round and another surfaces. That’s not a flaw in the process. That IS the process.
If you’ve ever drafted a book, you know this terrain. Around chapter seven, everything tangles. The draft looks worse than the idea did in your head, and the doubt moves in. The messy middle isn’t proof you’re doing it wrong. It’s proof you’re doing it.
So wherever your messy middle is right now, the half-packed apartment, the half-written chapter, the half-made decision, keep going.
The mess means you’re working.
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