Hallway feeling
Annie & Alison Newsletter #12
“I feel like I’m standing in a long hallway with many closed doors. Should I keep standing here and wait until one inevitably opens? How long will that take? Should I start knocking on some of them? Which ones do I knock on first?” - a friend during a recent phone conversation.
I think this “hallway feeling,” as I’ll call it, is a familiar place for many of us. Hallways represent transition, and they are everywhere — careers, relationships, beliefs, entire life phases. Sometimes we choose to enter the hallway, and other times we’re forced into it.
Our time there can be brief — a quick slam of one door and rushed opening of the next. Or it can seem to last forever, particularly when we’re facing indecision or the sting of a door closed in our faces.
I’ve been standing in a hallway for a few months now. Admittedly, I chose to enter it. At first I took time to discern which doors to try. Then I knocked. Several of them opened a crack, letting me peer inside and get a taste for what could be. And over the last few weeks, all but one door were decidedly shut on me, leaving me still in the hallway.
I’m grateful for the one door that’s still open. I’m peering inside, and it may just be the next room I will enter. But I want to acknowledge that the hallway can be a lonely place. It’s easy to assume that a closed door means we’re not worthy to enter it. It’s tempting to lean into feelings of exclusion. No one wants to hear “no,” when everything in them cries “YES, let me in! I belong in there!”
As a personal principle, I try to resist cliché or pat responses when someone is in a tough spot. So please don’t roll your eyes when I say that if you’re in a hallway today, I think you should keep knocking. I really do. I believe there’s a next right room where you belong. And while you’re standing in the hallway, know that you’re not alone. Consider this newsletter as me giving you a friendly wave down the long corridor.
Sometimes the best next step, is to knock on the door where food happens, aka your own kitchen. That’s a door that’s always open, right? In my hallway-waiting this week, I cooked these reviewed recipes:
69 recipes cooked, 156 to go.
During this week of cooking…
I learned… how to prepare and cook squid! Did you know that the little calamari rings you get at a restaurant are actually from a squid’s long, tubular body? Once you slice the body into thin rings, they get their signature curled edge as soon as they touch a hot pan, and they diminish in size as they cook!
I listened to… a really long list of names being read at my brother-in-law’s graduation. I honestly love this part of the ceremony, silently cheering for every person that walks across the platform to receive their diploma. I like to wonder about all the obstacles they overcame on their way to that stage and all the joys they experienced along the journey. So many stories held in those names, each of them important, each of them still being written.
Well, that’s all from this hallway gal.
xo,
Annie
