Welcome to the daily Ascent. I'm Molly Carmel. This is the podcast they always wish existed. A bite sized on the ground spiritual note that can shift your thinking and your outlook on life to help make us all a little bit more awake, alive and ascending.
What a time we're all having, huh? From time to time. So I want to talk today about something I think a lot of us do. And I caught a friend of mine doing it the other.
I mean, I'm sure I do it all the time. We call the game before it's over. So a friend of mine is going through a really hard time in her career. Or, I mean, at least that's what she's calling it.
I'm honestly not that convinced. But here we are. And so we were on the phone and she was really, really down and she said to me, you know, I'm just grieving the end of my care. And it was tricky, right, because I heard her and I really wanted to validate how she was feeling because I think those feelings are really real and they matter, you know me.
But here's the thing about this particular friend of mine. She is like a very talented person. Like honestly, maybe one of the most, like, vivacious, talented, go getting people that I know. And so perhaps this particular thing that she's been doing in her career is coming to an end.
Maybe that chapter is closing. But that's really far from her career being over. Like that's a chapter ending, not a whole book ending. And so as I do, I just gently pushed back and I said, what if this isn't the end of your career?
What if this is just end of a version of it? What if you're just in the messy middle? You know, that part between what was and what's next? Because I think we do this, like I definitely do this when something is hard and uncomfortable and we can't see how it's going to turn out.
We would rather call it a death than sit in the not knowing. Like, we would rather declare it done and over than stay in the uncertainty of what might become. There's something almost comforting about grief, right? At least it's definitive, right?
At least you know where you stand. The messy middle. It doesn't give you that. The messy middle says like, I don't quite know what this is yet, right?
And that can be excruciating. And here's the thing, the door hasn't even fully closed on her. She's actually only anticipating the door closing. She's in such advanced grieving, she's like pre grieving, she's trying to control the narrative before the narrative's finished writing itself.
And listen, I totally get it because I do this too. Maybe you do this too. We think if we can just accept the worst case scenario now, we'll be protected from the pain of it actually happening. But if we're honest, all we're really doing is living in the loss before the loss has even arrived.
And there's a great pocket stage on this one. She's been a. She's a friend of the show, Brene Brown. Love her and her book, Rising Strong's a great one.
Honestly, it's a great one. If you want to pick a good Renee, Rising Strong's a wonderful book and she talks a lot about normalizing these messy parts of being human. And so she writes, the middle is messy, but it's also where the magic happens. You can't skip day two, day two, or whatever that middle space is for.
Your own process is when you're in the dark, the door has closed behind you. You're too far in to turn around and not close enough to see the ending yet. Let me read that again. For those of you in the back.
The middle is messy, but it's also where the magic happens. You can't skip day two, day two, or whatever that middle space is for Your own process is when you're in the dark, the door has closed behind you. You're too far in to turn around and not close enough to see the ending yet. She talks about this idea of day two, the space where you're in the dark.
Like you can't go back to what was and you can't see what's coming. I mean, that is doubt and discomfort. And when we want to give up and flee, like we want a resolution, but none of it means sitting in uncertainty. And the hardest part is that that day two, it can last a really long time.
It's not literally one day, it's just however long the middle takes. And that's exactly where my friend is. She's on a day two of her career, and instead of sitting in the mess, she's trying to skip straight to the ending. Even if that ending is grief, because at least grief has a shape.
The middle is shapeless. And so our word of the day today is unfinished. You know, that is one of the hardest things for a human being to tolerate. Unfinished, right?
We want resolution, we want closure. We want to know. And when we can't get the answer, we're better suited to make one up. And Usually it's the worst one.
But unfinished doesn't mean over. Unfinished means unfinished. It means you're in the middle of something that hasn't revealed itself yet. It means the story is still being written and you just don't have the information you need to write the final chapter or even the next chapter.
And that's okay, because it isn't yours to write right now. And Renee Brown is saying that you can't skip the middle. You can't bypass the mess to get to the resolution. And often when we try, when we're forcing an ending just to escape discomfort, we end up carrying the unfinished thing into our next chapter, right?
And we leave before the lesson arrives. And we never get to learn what's on the other side of this lesson, right? Or worse than that, we make rash decisions from these panicked places and end up creating a whole new mess to sit in. So skipping the messy middle, it doesn't save you from pain.
It just delays it and usually makes it worse. And I get that. That is so frustrating. Samesies.
But the messy middle is where things are sorting themselves out and where new paths and new ideas are inventing themselves. And it's really where the magic of your life is quietly doing its work. So I also want to say there is science behind this avoidance of the messy middle. I love a little science.
Our brains are wired to prefer bad certainty over good uncertainty. So our brains would rather be in bad certainty over good uncertainty. Like our brain would rather know for sure that something is terrible than sit in the possibility that it might work out. And that's how uncomfortable the unknown is for us.
We would literally choose confirmed suffering over unresolved hope. Because at least suffering gets us something solid to stand on. And that's what my friend was doing, right? She was taking something messy and incomplete and just trying to make a funeral for it.
Because at least a funeral has structure and a beginning and an end. And a funeral means we can stop wondering. And her brain was reaching for that control. But the messy middle isn't asking you to stop wondering.
It's asking you to wonder with some patience, right? To sit in the not knowing, to resist the urge to call the game before the final quarter has been played. And I don't know, in my life, I've done this so many times, I've decided that something was over when it was just really taking a shape that I didn't recognize it. I know that's happened in my career.
I know that's happened in relationships. I know that's happened in My family. And honestly, looking back, some of the most amazing things that have happened to me were directly from ashes that I was ready to grieve. They rose right from those ashes.
You know, relationships that I've ended made room for even better ones that I couldn't even have written down on paper. Career chapters that I closed in what felt like utter and complete failure became the ground for what I'm doing right now, which I love. Like, seasons that I thought were just the absolute darkest and worst in my life ended up being clearing paths for something I couldn't have imagined. And there's this roomie line, the poet Rumi.
I love it. And it says, you know, burn down the barn, and now you see the moon. And sometimes that thing that feels like destruction is just removing what's blocking your view. But you can't see the moon while you're still trying to save the barn.
So, listen, if you're in a messy middle right now in your career and relationships and your health and your healing, I just want to offer you this. What if you don't know how it ends? Like, what if it's an I don't know, instead of an ending, Right? What if it's just where you are?
And so your effective question for the day is, what are you calling over that might just be unfinished? And listen, if this is resonating, if you have been in a messy middle with your relationship with food or your body or your relationship with eating, and you've been tempted to call the game and say, you know, I'm a hopeless case, this is just never going to work. You know, grieving something that isn't actually dead. Oh, my gosh, I hear you.
And my stop starting over system. Like, it's all about this messy middle. We don't pretend it's easy and we don't let you skip it. But we also don't let you quit in the middle of your own story.
And so if you're ready to stop calling the game early, you know, I'm obsessed with talking to you. So you can schedule a free call with me in the link in the show notes, or you can go to my website, Molly Carmel.com to learn more. And I am right here with you Ascenders learning to sit in the middle without writing the ending. And, you know, if this episode made you think and you're like, I should send this to my bestie.
Go. Or it post it. Send it like it. Subscribe to it.
I'm so obsessed with growing our Ascender crew. We rise together. Until next time.