The Space In Between

There is a moment each year that rarely gets talked about but holds an extraordinary kind of wisdom. It’s not New Year’s Eve, not January 1st, not even the first Monday back in reality. It is that quiet stretch in between — when one year is exhaling and the next has not yet demanded anything of you.

For most of my life, I treated that week as a scheduling opportunity. It was the perfect time, I thought, to make plans, organize calendars, set intentions, draft resolutions, choose the next version of myself, and get ahead before anyone else noticed the new year had started. It felt efficient, ambitious, and maybe a little self-righteous as if my productivity could signal worth.

Then one year, with a brand-new notebook open and a handful of favorite pens beside me, I caught myself writing the same goals I had carried into three previous Januaries. Different wording, bolder fonts, new categories, but emotionally, the same chase. The realization unsettled me. It wasn’t the repetition that bothered me; it was the sense that I was trying to outrun the truth of who I was at the end of the year.

So I did something unfamiliar — I closed the notebook.

Instead of planning the next version of me, I sat quietly with the current one. And that changed the meaning of this in-between space forever.

What I discovered was that this week isn’t actually empty; it is instructive. It isn’t asking for ambition; it is asking for attention. It doesn’t invite reinvention; it invites recognition. It is one of the only calendar moments where you can pause long enough to see the gap between the woman you inched toward and the one you still say you want to be. Today, this week is my mirror. I no longer ask, “What will I do next?” I ask:

Who did I become this year?

Did I lead with presence instead of urgency?Did I listen to myself more often than I adapted to others?Did I honor what I said mattered most?

These are uncomfortable questions at times because they don’t accept performance as proof. They demand intimacy instead of perfection. They insist on honesty, not aspiration.

This past year, my answers revealed something tender and fierce at once. 2025 asked more of me than I expected and offered more than I acknowledged in real time. I settled more deeply into my business. I watched clients remember who they are and lead from that truth. I became a high-school mom — not through a manual but through moments: sideline conversations, cafeteria stories, teenage silences, tiny heartbreaks and proud glances. I said goodbye to parts of my identity that needed release and welcomed others I wasn’t planning for.

My word for the 2025 year was grace — not because I anticipated a soft year, but because I needed to learn how to give it to myself. Halfway through 2025, I realized something that startled me: grace only transforms you when you let it land on you first. Otherwise, it becomes something you grant everyone around you while starving yourself of it. Once that clicked, it shifted the way I led, worked, mothered, loved, and rested.

This is why the week between years feels sacred now. It is not blank space; it is truth space. It is the moment where you stop performing your identity and actually meet it. It invites you to notice not what you built, but who you became while building. It gives you permission to sit in your becoming without immediately turning it into output.

I often tell women I work with that they don’t need to start over — they need to start intentionally. That is what this stretch of days teaches me. There is something liberating about realizing you don’t need to reinvent yourself every year; you simply need to return to yourself. The world speeds up again soon: emails, expectations, agendas, and pressures resume without missing a beat. But this small, suspended pocket of time belongs to you.

So as 2025 closes, I invite you to sit in the pause. Let it reveal the distance you’ve traveled, the boundaries you held even when it shook you, the truths you finally admitted to yourself, the days you rested because your body spoke louder than your calendar.

And the woman you became this year — imperfect, wiser, stretched, more honest — she is the foundation of everything that comes next. Not the polished version you were aiming for, but the lived one.

The power to shift is not waiting for January. It is already beside you, in the quiet.

Let this in-between space be where you do not rush past yourself but meet yourself again.

Welcome to your new year.