Between Shells.
There is no messy middle in tech, only an in-between.
Some Weeks Are Just A Lot
There are weekends, and then there are WEEKS-PLEASE-END, and this past one is going in the history books. Of all the many things that happened, I’m just going to focus on the sense-making of AI in our lives.
The Field
Sunday night, I finished How to Get to Heaven from Belfast on Netflix. If you haven’t watched it, honestly, just go. It’s the kind of storytelling I aspire to. There’s a scene near the end where one of the characters stands in a field with her younger self on one side and her teenage self on the other.
Stay with me…
Before I worked in tech, I was a life coach. A good one, actually, but plagued by imposter syndrome, which tracks because before that I was an actress. So I’ve spent the entirety of my adult life learning to regulate my nervous system and studying how our childhood selves show up in the middle of change, quietly pulling strings we didn’t even know we had.
And I believe the change has gotten so loud, we can no longer look away.
We, too, are standing in a field with our past selves, trying to figure out who gets to come forward.
There Is No Messy Middle
People talk about the messy middle like it’s a phase. Like there’s a tidy endpoint somewhere, a moment when things clarify and we all emerge, blinking, into the light.
There isn’t.
For humans navigating technology, there is no messy middle. There is only the messy in-between. And they are different.
The in-between doesn’t resolve. It just becomes the next version of itself. Like a crab without its shell, exposed, soft, weirdly vulnerable, before the new one forms.
That’s us right now. All of us are trying to make sense of AI while the world rearranges itself around us. Some are figuring it out loudly, some quietly, some late at night, and most of us are wondering if everyone else has figured this out.
They don’t. I promise you.
What I Know From My Coaching Days
Here’s what my life coaching self would say, and she’s usually right even when I don’t want to hear her:
Change of any kind rocks us. It uncovers, pulls at, and breaks open all the parts of us that aren’t ready. And the speed of change right now means those parts are getting no rest.
So your job is to genuinely get to know yourself. Why you resist? What you’re actually afraid of? Which version of you is making the decisions?
That work used to mean journaling, therapy, and coaching. It still does. But today you can also bring AI into that process, not to replace the inner work, but to accelerate it. AI is the best pattern-matcher, the best “read between the lines” tool we’ve ever had at our fingertips. It will ask you questions you’d never think to ask yourself.
Try this with Claude: “I’m going through a period of significant change and I’m not sure how I feel about it. Interview me, one question at a time, to help me understand what I’m actually resisting and what I’m ready for.”
Just talk. See what surfaces.
A Small Personal Confession
For complete transparency, I did break up with ChatGPT this weekend. I’d been thinking about it for a while, and recent events were the push I needed. I tried to pull a Jack Berger Post-it note (if you know you know lol), but ironically Chat and I had a very levelheaded conversation about why I was leaving, and it assured me it would be there when I was ready to come back.
How presumptuous. 🙄
So if you need it → https://claude.com/import-memory