Champagne Confessions

Life doesn’t announce its turning points. It drifts.

One day, you wake up and realize that what once felt anchored has quietly unmoored. The rituals, the friendships, the familiar cadence of your days, they haven’t vanished, not exactly. They’ve simply… changed. Softly, but unmistakably. A friend stops calling. A holiday tradition becomes an afterthought. A place you once felt entirely yourself in now feels just slightly off, like returning to a house where the furniture has been rearranged.

This is the in-between.

The space where nostalgia collides with reality.

Where memory feels sharper than presence.

Where we are no longer who we were, and not yet who we are becoming.

We’re told to cherish every moment, but the truth is, not every moment is worth treasuring. Some are better left sealed in the quiet archives of our memory, untouched and unsentimental. Others, those rare, incandescent fragments of joy and connection, fade too quickly, no matter how tightly we cling.

And so we begin to unlearn.

To unlearn the instinct to preserve.

To unlearn the myth that we can freeze time with enough effort.

To unlearn the idea that sameness equals stability.

Growing older isn’t just about watching your body change. It’s about watching your context shift. It’s about realizing that the people who knew your childhood laugh may not recognize your adult silence. It’s about letting go of people you still love, not because the love is gone, but because the fit no longer holds. And perhaps that’s the quiet ache of adulthood: learning to mourn what is no longer yours without bitterness, and to accept what remains without guilt.

No one warns you that grief has a subtle form, it often shows up as disconnection.

From friends. From habits. From the person you used to be.

But here’s the uncomfortable grace of the in-between: it’s not a punishment. It’s a passage. It is where we learn that not every feeling demands validation. Not every drift requires correction. Some changes don’t need fixing, they need witnessing.

And perhaps that’s enough.

Because most of life is lived in this liminal space:

Not at the beginning.

Not at the climax.

But in the soft middle where meaning is neither clear nor complete.

We wait.

We evolve.

We learn to sit with questions that won’t be answered.

We learn to find presence even in the absences.

Who knew aging would feel like this?

Not dramatic, not devastating, just different.

A series of subtle shifts.

A rearranging of the familiar.

And still, here you are.

No longer defined by who you were.

Not yet anchored in who you will become.

Just standing in the in-between, quiet, unglamorous, necessary.

And maybe, just maybe, this is where real becoming begins.