2025: Living in the In-Between

There are years when change is obvious — marked by clear endings or visible milestones.
And then there are years when everything shifts beneath the surface first.

For me, 2025 held both.

It was the year when long-running internal shifts finally began to show themselves more visibly in how I was living, relating, and orienting in the world.

The truth is, things had been reorganizing internally for several years before this year arrived. Emotions that had once stayed tucked away began surfacing more consistently. Long-standing patterns — how I respond to pressure, how I relate to worth, how tightly my identity was fused with work — started revealing themselves more clearly.

What once felt energizing, especially professionally, began to feel hollow and unfulfilling.

By early 2025, what had been a quiet intuition for years reached a tipping point. In February, I stepped away from my job and into the unknown — not with a clear plan, but with a strong sense that something deeper was asking to be trusted.

If 2024 felt like an identity unraveling, 2025 became the embodiment of that shift.
The old version of me had loosened its grip.
The next version hadn’t fully emerged yet.

That space in between — where life is still functioning, responsibilities remain intact, but internal orientation is reorganizing — is what I’ve come to recognize as liminal space.

And it’s pretty uncomfortable.

When Growth Finds Its Next Edge

One of the lessons this year offered me was this:
growth doesn’t slow down just because you think it should.

After how transformative 2024 was, part of me assumed the intensity would taper off — that integration would be gentler, more linear. Instead, 2025 revealed a new edge altogether. More layers surfaced. More refinement was required.

Transformation, it turns out, touches everything.

I thought this year was primarily about vocation. Instead, it reached into relationships, family dynamics, faith, and the nervous system itself. What I’ve come to see is that these aren’t separate things. The relational and inner work weren’t distractions from clarity around my work — they were the conditions that are making space for it to emerge.

Most of the lessons arrived without gold stars or external validation. They came through discomfort. Through slowing down when I wanted certainty. Through restraint when I wanted resolution.

Again and again, life seemed to interrupt my attempts to “figure it out,” redirecting my attention back to what was right in front of me.

Force, Trust, and the Body’s Wisdom

A pattern became impossible to ignore this year: how often I override what my body knows because my mind has already decided on a story.

There were moments of relief — like the week after quitting my job — followed by a subtler, more revealing sensation: the underlying belief that if I wasn’t actively producing, striving, or building, I was somehow falling behind.

My nervous system oscillated throughout the year.
High highs.
Low lows.
Periods of ordinary life with little emotional charge at all.

Disorientation.
A persistent pit in the stomach when the next steps weren’t visible.

What I’m learning — slowly — is that the body carries a kind of intelligence the mind can’t always translate immediately. I’m practicing listening to those signals even when they don’t come with explanations yet.

This phase of life feels far less about force and far more about trust — especially trust in timing.

And that’s been humbling.

Authenticity Over Performance

As certainty softened, something else grew clearer: authenticity and alignment began to matter more than performance, likability, or external coherence.

I found myself letting go of the fantasy that everyone will understand or approve. Difficult conversations — once avoided — became unavoidable. Relationships began reorganizing alongside identity.

On the outside, I was still functioning.
Still responsible.
Still showing up.

Internally, nearly everything was being renegotiated.

It’s an uncomfortable place to live — especially for those of us who were once good at seeing the path forward.

A Collective Threshold

What I’ve experienced personally this year has made it easier to recognize something similar unfolding collectively.

We are living in an in-between across multiple domains at once. Systems built for the industrial age are straining under the weight of exponential change. Productivity has long been a primary source of identity, and now we’re collectively grappling with what meaning looks like when technology can outperform us at scale.

AI isn’t just changing how we work — it’s quietly challenging how we define value, contribution, and even sense of self.

I feel a great deal of avoidance everywhere right now — a temptation to numb, distract, or cling to familiar structures rather than face reality as it is. At the same time, there is enormous potential here. Shadow material long suppressed is surfacing, both individually and collectively.

The emotional tone feels uneasy.
Volatile.
Braced.

But also alive with possibility.

Looking Toward 2026

When I say that 2026 will likely feel more liminal, I don’t mean catastrophic, although it may feel that way at times.
I mean clarifying.

Change that’s been easy to dismiss will become harder to ignore. The ground may feel less predictable. And in that terrain, certain capacities will matter more than plans or strategies:

Presence.
Embodiment.
Discernment.
The willingness to sit with discomfort without rushing to fix it.
The courage to hold multiple perspectives at once.

Personally, I’m orienting toward trust in Life — not passivity, but a deeper trust in timing and process. I’m continuing to learn and train in ways that help me stay close to the thresholds people are navigating — especially where nervous system regulation, perception, and identity intersect.

As part of that orientation, I’ve committed in 2026 to a certification in microdosing facilitation — not as a solution or a shortcut, but as a disciplined way of understanding how subtle shifts in awareness can support people moving through periods of transition. For me, this sits alongside contemplative practice, psychological work, and relational depth — not above them.

I don’t have a tidy conclusion to offer.

Only this: if you find yourself functioning well on the surface while something deeper reorganizes beneath it — if the old way no longer fits and the new one hasn’t arrived — you’re not alone.

Sometimes the most meaningful work of a year happens quietly, in the in-between, in the liminal space.

And sometimes, that’s exactly where life is inviting us to listen.

As one year closes and another begins, the invitation may not be to resolve the in-between, but to stay present within it.

In the in-between,
-Matt