Dear Katherine,

Middle school is over. High school hasn’t started. It’s summer, and I thought I’d feel free—but mostly I feel weird. Like I’m in this big pause. My friends are changing. Everything is.

Who will I even be in the fall?

—In Between and Unsure

My dearest In Between and Unsure,

Everyone loves to romanticize fresh starts. As if flipping a calendar page turns you into someone new.

What they don’t say—what they can’t say—is that the stretch before the beginning is where it actually hurts.

That quiet in-between? It’s where everything familiar goes still. The rhythm disappears. The people you used to orbit drift, or change, or stay—but feel different now.

You start to wonder if the version of you that felt most alive was just a phase. A coincidence. A side effect of the place, or the group, or the season.

I’ve lived entire lives in that space.

Between names. Between homes. Between who I was and who I needed to become next.

And I’ll tell you this, darling: the ache you feel? That’s not weakness. That’s memory. That’s truth.

It tells you what mattered. Who saw you clearly. Where you didn’t have to shrink, or soften, or explain.

And no matter what ended—if that feeling was real, it doesn’t just disappear. It lives in you now. You can carry it. Or you can build from it.

You don’t have to know who you’ll be this fall. Just pay attention to what still pulls at you in the quiet.

That’s where to begin.

With all my wicked little heart,
Katherine 🖤