Passages

“Sonja, we’re in between.” She said in a voice message, somewhere between her cooking potato soup and me lying in bed being sick. She was so sure about it. No hesitation. And I think she’s right.

In between. Between old and new. Like the transit zone at an airport. No longer there, but not yet here.

It’s been showing up everywhere lately. This in between. My friend from the voice message, who moved to the countryside – she left the city, but hasn’t quite arrived yet. Another friend between two jobs – no longer in the old one, not yet started in the new. And then my parents, who I discovered during my last visit had been without a nationality for a while. Stateless. No longer belonging to the country they left, but not yet belonging to the new one either. Their passports confirmed it. Stateless, says the stamp. I quietly thought to myself at the family brunch table: somehow, a little like me right now. Not stateless on paper – but somewhere in between. German, yet no longer in Germany. Living in France, yet not quite French.

Where are we when we are no longer there –

but not yet here?

A few days later, I visited an exhibition about the crossing between Marseille and Tangier. One word stayed with me: Passage. I felt an immediate sense of belonging to it. Lost between time, place, and a state of being. I like how the word sounds. And I like that it’s identical in German and French – always a good sign.

If you look at what a passage means across different contexts – music, architecture, literature – it is fundamentally a section, a transition, a part within something larger. Not the destination. Not the beginning. Something in between that connects and makes movement possible. That is exactly what my situation feels like to me: a passage within a larger story.

And if that’s true – if this in-between is not a problem to solve but part of the journey itself, then maybe the question changes.

Not: when does this passage end? But: what is this trying to show me?

Maybe it wants to show me who the next version of me is. How she wants to feel in everyday life, how she wants to think, behave, move. Maybe it is no longer about what I am supposed to do or could do, but about what I actually want to do.

And by that, I don’t mean higher, faster, better. Maybe slower. More conscious. Simpler. More aligned with myself and with what truly matters to me. Less driven by expectations, more guided by intention. Less about proving something or trying to be the person I think I’m supposed to be, and more about being fully present in my own life.

And it makes me wonder: what if this process of moving through is just as important as arriving? What if it’s not about arriving at all, but about staying in motion? About remaining open and curious, meeting and listening to yourself again and again, in new and unfamiliar ways?

I like being flexible, adaptive, fluid. But it’s fucking uncomfortable sometimes. Embracing this state is genuinely challenging. Not knowing. Trusting yourself and your path. Staying on the path you chose while other people – consciously or unconsciously – pull you in different directions, and familiar things act like magnets.

Scrolling through job listings even though I know exactly what I want to do. Saying yes when everything in me wants to say no. Making others comfortable at the expense of myself because it feels familiar. Letting go of old patterns, old certainties, old ways of beingwithout knowing what comes next.

But here’s the thing: sometimes you have to let go of old versions of yourself to become the one that is already waiting inside you. And that feels a little like grief. Disorientation. Lost in no man’s land. No longer who you were. Not yet who you’re becoming.

Who are we when everything from the outside that we thought defined us falls away? The job. The apartment. The city. The language we lived in. The friendships that shaped our days. The social roles we took on. The habits and behaviours that felt like us – but were perhaps only familiar. I once said I felt like a hard-boiled egg that had been peeled. Naked. Vulnerable. Without a shell. Forced to rebuild from the inside out.

And so I keep returning to the same question:

Who will I become if I allow myself to become?

I sit with that question. A huge opportunity. A huge challenge. And probably not the easiest path. But for me, the only right one.

The old version of me was good. It served me well. It brought me here. But only this far. Something else is waiting now. And for that, I can’t stay the same, clinging to old defence mechanisms and survival strategies just because they feel familiar. They no longer fit the life I want to live or the person I want to be.

Yes, I’m scared. So much is new, unfamiliar, unknown — and I have no idea what’s still coming. But I know it’s right. And I’m learning that two things can be true at the same time: I can be deeply uncomfortable, and happier than I’ve ever been.

It can take time. It can be chaotic. It can be a process. There is no need to rush through a passage. I want to move through it slowly enough to actually experience it — to notice what it asks of me, to see what it reveals. Because this in-between space matters just as much as arriving somewhere. Maybe more than we realize.

The path is the destination. And I like the path I’ve chosen for myself.

Being able to go to the rocks. With my favourite person.

Just like that. On a weekday after work.

Ready to jump into the water. Head first.