Between the Burn and the Bloom
On leaving the lie, sitting in the wreckage, and trusting the next life to rise. (Sunday Love Letter, vol. 10)
My wild-hearted one,
I write to you from the borderlands between what was and what will be. That strange twilight where your soul has already chosen truth, but your life still wears the clothing of yesterday.
You know this place. I see it in your eyes.
This liminal space where time curves like a river. Your old self shed like autumn leaves while the new one forms beneath, tender and uncertain. Your heart whispers "finally" while your mind rehearses catastrophes on endless repeat.
The messy middle.
It finds you at 3 AM when silence roars after walking away from religion. The void once filled with certainty now open to stars. Terrifying and electric all at once. It curls beside you in bed after divorce, sheets cool on one side, freedom and grief sharing a single pillow. It sits with you as you turn away clients who pay bills but drain your spirit, wondering which will arrive first: emptiness or abundance.
I know these threshold places intimately. I've made my home in them.
When I finally let go of the evangelical framework that had both sheltered and confined me, no triumphant music played. Only the vast silence of a universe suddenly too close without all those divine intermediaries I'd been taught to need. For years I prayed my brother back from cancer's edge, collapsed under grief and guilt when he died anyway. I watched church leaders condemn queer lives while hiding their own sins, preached submission for women while I found strength and leadership in those same sacred texts they selectively quoted. The cosmic math failed. I had to admit the truth.
That honesty cost everything. Community, identity, language for meaning itself. Before new understanding could grow, there was only... space. Raw, electric, honest space.
The same hollow opened when I faced my marriage: perfectly choreographed but pulse-less and abusive beneath the surface. The photographs lovely, the safe connection gone. So I chose freefall over continuing to perfect the dance steps of intimacy that looked better than it felt.
No one hands you the field guide to these brave demolitions. They never warn you that courageous endings birth not tidy beginnings but wild possibility. And possibility breaks you open. Resists documentation. Makes for terrible status updates. Demands to be lived through, not solved.
This explains our silence around the messy middle. It violates our addiction to neat transformations. Won't be condensed into "Five Simple Steps." Remains what it is: holy chaos transforming you cell by cell.
Here's the truth I've carved into my bones: this disorienting threshold demands surrender, not white-knuckled endurance. The messy middle isn't some uncomfortable pause between real moments. It is life itself, unfiltered and raw. Stop waiting for it to end so you can start living. This is where the living happens.
Because after walking through spiritual wilderness, relationship endings, and business reinventions, I know this: the messy middle is where we actually live. Where we discover what remains when external validation burns away. Where transformation happens not through transaction but through metamorphosis that dissolves what we were before creating what comes next.
The caterpillar never chose to become soup inside the chrysalis. Nature required it.
Even if your subconscious desperately tries to tell you that your discomfort means you made a mistake, I promise you it doesn’t. It tells the story of someone who refused the greatest betrayal: abandoning yourself for the comfort of others. You've called back your power from systems, relationships, and roles that promised safety for the price of your soul.
That reclamation? Pure liberation. Your first full breath after years of shallow living.
I wish someone had sat me down over a strong caramel machiato with protein powder and told me the truth about peace. Peace arrives when you finally stop lying to yourself, not when the struggle ends.
That knot in your stomach during transition? Simply your body learning to speak authenticity after years of fluency in compromise. And that grief that keeps washing over you for what was? Let it come. Your choice to grow remains valid. The grief just honors the parts of you that loved before you knew better.
So if you stand now in your particular wilderness… newly alone, newly sober, newly independent, newly faithless, newly anything that required letting go, remember:
Remember this when the floor seems to vanish beneath you: chaos plants seeds nothing else can. The garden of your next life only grows in soil turned by upheaval. You need the vertigo of uncertainty to see beyond your carefully constructed horizons.
And that discomfort crawling under your skin? A homecoming bell… or sometimes a gong, if we’re honest, at least in my case anyway. ;p Bottom line is, it’s your body recognizing the truth before your mind can find the words for it.
Those who need your compliance will question your sanity. Those who fed on your performance will doubt your wisdom. The voice of convention will try to seduce you back to safety. DO NOT LET IT.
Let them wonder. You're busy becoming.
The world's validation always arrives late. While you wait for the tangible signs… the soulful relationship, the aligned business, the new authentic community, the body that feels like home… please please remember what already exists: You. Awake. Alive. Unwilling to trade truth for comfort ever again.
This alone deserves celebration under moonlight.
Breathe into these seemingly empty spaces. They pulse with unborn possibilities. Trust the wisdom guiding your transformation. It knows precisely what must fall away and what remains after the burning, even while your mind begs for guarantees.
The messy middle reveals itself as no purgatory. It's a birthing room. And something magnificent fights its way into existence through necessary pain.
With fierce tenderness,
Tams
P.S., If you could use a soul doula, I have space for 1:1 work with you. I’ve been there, done that, got the degrees and the experience to help you move through and make your previous ceiling your new floor. Email me at hello@tamaradriskell.com if you’re intrigued.
Also, P.P.S., starting next week, tech willing, I’ve got something special brewing for those of you who want more: audio musings, raw essays I don’t share anywhere else,
and first access to the Liberation Lab ~ a new series of one-off workshops for the parts of you hungry for freedom without the fluff.
Paid members get the full experience.
Doors open soon. You’ll want to be inside.
Speechless reading this. Moving, powerful, and bursting with truth.