there is a version of me that already left, and a version that has not fully arrived, and for longer than I want to admit, I lived in the space between them.

The room with no name yet

I know this room. It is not the exit and it is not the arrival. It is the threshold, the hallway between two versions of a woman, and nobody warns you how long you might stand in it. The version of me who used to make herself smaller so someone else could feel bigger, she is nearly gone now. But the woman who takes up her whole seat at the table, who speaks in her real voice, who dresses like she means it, she had not fully arrived either. I lived in that hallway longer than any of my letters to you would suggest.

I remember standing in front of the mirror at that hour when the light over the rice fields turns the color of weak tea, unable to tell which parts of my reflection I still recognized. Some mornings I opened my closet and every piece in it belonged to a woman I no longer was. Other mornings I reached for something new and it felt like a costume, like I was performing a future that had not actually happened yet. Nothing fit the way it should. Not because the clothes had changed. Because I had.

What Bali taught me about the space between

In Bali, no ceremony begins at the doorway. It begins with the crossing itself, the walk from one state into another, slow enough for the body to catch up to what the soul already knows. The artisan families I work with understand this better than anyone I have met. When they hand dye our Rainbeau colorway, the cloth spends up to seven days in botanical pigment, layer after layer, color building on color. For most of that week the fabric is neither its old shade nor its new one. It holds a color that has no name yet. Nobody rushes it. Nobody calls that week a failure of the dye. They simply keep returning to the pot, morning after morning, and let the cloth decide when it is ready.

I think about that fabric often. If cotton can sit in its own becoming for seven days without anyone panicking, I can let myself sit in mine a little longer too. So can you.

Dressing for the woman I had not become yet

I made the Linen Yin Yang Suka Set for this exact season. Two halves, light and dark, sewn into one silhouette. As above, so below. Not resolved into a single color. Held instead. It is the closest thing I have found to what it feels like to be a woman in between versions of herself. Still both. Not yet neither. Whole in the holding. Because the dye comes from the same living batch, no two sets ever come out quite the same, and I have made peace with that. The woman in between versions never looks exactly like the one before her either.

You do not need to know exactly who you are becoming to dress her with intention. You only need to stop dressing like the woman who already left. Choose the fabric that feels honest against your skin today, not the one that performed you three years ago, and not the one you imagine will perform you three years from now. Let the in-between have its own wardrobe. She deserves one too.

The second letter

This is the second in five letters I am writing this season. The woman who has been making herself smaller. The woman in between versions. The woman who is still here. The woman who chose herself. The woman who knows. Today's letter is for the middle one. Nobody writes odes to her. She rarely gets a party or a milestone or a name for what she is going through. She is simply the hardest to see and the most necessary to become.

If you are in that hallway right now, I am not going to tell you to hurry through it. I am going to tell you what I wish someone had told me while I was still in mine. Wear something that holds both halves of you today. Let it be honest instead of finished. The rest of you will arrive when it arrives.

With love from Bali,
Myrah