On the books I couldn’t finish

I bought the books. A lot of them. Some came recommended. Others found their way into a cart at 2am, when sleep felt further away than answers.

They were good books. Thoughtful ones, written by people wiser than me. I would get a few chapters in and put them down.

It took me a long time to understand why, and when I did it was not flattering. It was not that the books were wrong. It was that a few chapters in I would start to feel like I had already fallen behind. Like there was a place I was supposed to have reached by now, a feeling I was supposed to be having, a step I was supposed to have finished. I had not. So I must be doing it wrong.

The books were built for a version of me who was already halfway healed.

I was not halfway healed. I was in the middle of it, and the middle does not read like the books.

I wasn’t looking for a framework. I wasn’t looking for steps. I certainly wasn’t looking for anyone to tell me how the season would make me stronger. I wanted someone to sit down.

That is the thing almost nobody offers, and I don’t think it’s unkindness. It’s that we don’t know what to do with the middle. We know what to say at the start, when something has just happened. We know what to say at the end, when it’s a story with a shape. The quiet uncertain stretch between what was and whatever comes next — nobody has a card for that.

So I started writing from there. Not because I had answers. Because I needed the companion I couldn’t find.

Some of you have read On the grief that had no funeral, On waking at 3am, On the loneliness of seeming okay. I thought I was writing letters. I was writing a book.

Those essays became Life in Between, a 90-day companion for the season after everything changed. Not a book about getting through it. A book for staying in it, one page at a time, for as long as it takes.

If you’ve been here these past months, thank you. You were reading before I knew what I was making.

And if you’re finding this for the first time: I hope it meets you where you are, and not where anyone expects you to be.

— Bukola.

P.S. Several of you have asked where to find it. Life in Between is here →

Limen is a quiet 90-day journey for women in the in-between. Begin with the six questions →