Being stuck in the "in-between" has been something I have been thinking about for a while. As we move through life, we are placed along a path, either chosen for us or not, that we follow, and have a set sort of identity. But what happens when we are suddenly in a place were the path is not picked for us, or necessarily obvious to us? Do we adapt to the surroundings, to what everyone else is doing, or do we create a new path? And can we create a new path and maintain the identity from the path that we have just come from?

I have found that I am stuck in a little bit of a bind by this question. As we approach the newness of our lives, careers, education, and friends (or those who we, at first glance, believed to be our friends), and we shed the new, where does our identity actually stand? Watching the public lately as I move through the new events of my life, I have observed that perhaps we are just putting on a mask that hides neither a presence or an identity. The identity that we create is simply a reflection of what we are socially expected to do. My in-between has been this transformation into the life of a graduate student, accepting what has been and what I have come from, while taking on the terrifying task of answering the question "what's next?" This is currently the in-between that I find myself grappling with.

When they face the predicament of not knowing what to do next or what comes next, literary characters are conveniently given a direction. If only life outside of the literary world were so easy. I am compelled to do many things. Characters of my own creation move forward as I direct them through life like a master puppeteer; all the while I wish, at times, that I had my own. Learning to navigate the new, the in-between, seems to be the biggest challenge of becoming my own adult, my own writer, my own puppeteer.

I have stepped out from behind a mask that does not hide anything, my presence or my identity, and I have stepped into a light which few seem to ever stand in. We are told as we grow up, "don't ever forget where you came from," and yet, as I move through life and develop a path of my own, I wonder what would happen if I simply, like dead skin, shed the past and where I came from? What would change? Would I live the life that I have now the same way that I do, or would forgetting my past change it all? If this theory is correct and the masks that we wear truly do not hide a presence or an identity, then we don't actually have a past, we simply have an illusion that we have constructed to be the truth and our past.