Yesterday a woman posted online asking the algorithm to find her people. Black women in their pivot season, she said. Women in the middle of a change they chose, or one that chose them, looking for somebody who understands what this in-between feels like.
Sis, the algorithm brought you to the right place. But let me tell you what it can’t deliver.
A pivot season is not a rebrand. It’s not a cute announcement or a new logo or a soft launch of the new you. Most days it looks like standing in a life that doesn’t fit anymore, holding a vision of one that hasn’t fully arrived yet. You are too far from who you were to go back, and too honest to pretend you’re already who you’re becoming.
Here’s what I know about this season, because I have lived it more than once.
The in-between is not empty. It feels empty because the old identity was loud. It had a title, a routine, a way people introduced you. The new one is still forming, so it speaks softer. That quiet is not absence. That is construction.
You do not owe anybody the finished version while you’re still in the middle. Read that again. The pressure to explain your pivot, to make it make sense at brunch, to present a five-year plan when you’re still in year zero, that pressure will rush you into a life that isn’t yours. Some things have to be built in private before they are strong enough to be public.
And the grief? It’s real, even when the change was your choice. You can be grateful for what’s next and still ache for what was. Those two truths can live in the same body. Let them.
So if you’re in a pivot season right now, hear me: you are not behind. You are not lost. You are in the middle, and the middle is a holy place. It’s where identity gets rebuilt, on purpose this time.
Your people are out here. We find each other the way we always do, one honest post, one real conversation at a time.
Welcome to the middle. Let’s become here.
— Kimberly
