The Messy Middle, Success, and What It Means to Return

A pair of attentive birds tend to their hatchlings in a nest nestled among lush green leaves, creating a serene wildlife scene just outside the window.

A reflection on success, dream & The Homecoming.

Lately, I’ve been watching a bird’s nest outside my balcony. Fragile, woven from scraps of twigs and thread, yet strong enough to hold life. The birds don’t measure success in trophies or external validation. They measure it in return: returning to the nest, returning to each other, returning to building, again and again.

Maybe that’s what success is: not applause, but return.

There is the messy middle, the in-between where things are uncertain. It’s uncomfortable, often unbearable, and it’s where most people give up. Yet I believe it’s also where the greatest growth happens. The place where something real begins to take shape, if we can stay, if we can keep returning.

And in some way, "The Homecoming" book has mirrored that.

There were moments in the messy middle where it would have been easier to give up. But instead, I chose to return to myself, and to the heart of this project. I even reshaped the way this book will come into the world: I decided to change my publisher and find a new editor who understands the soul of this work. It was taxing, but it feels truer.

Grateful memo thanking readers who preordered "The Homecoming."

When I began writing The Homecoming, I thought success was measured in numbers: a date of completion, book sales, a shiny stamp of “Bestseller.” And yes, those things have their place. But what good is that shine, if it hardens us?

Now, for me, true success will be the moment when words from this book reach someone who has been waiting for language to describe their ache and their longing. When, in a single breath, they realise they are breaking the loop of survival, and spiraling inward, back to themselves.

What Arundhati Roy wrote feels closer to success: 

"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.” 

A mother bird tends to her hungry chicks nestled comfortably in a nest amidst lush green leaves right outside the window.

Perhaps success is not about never falling, but about befriending defeat. Not accepting it passively, but recognising that so-called failure might be fertile ground, worth striving toward, because it teaches us how to return, to rise and to rebuild.

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Dreams are not without risk. To dream is to step into the ocean between what is and what could be, on a fragile raft of determination & luck. The price of dreaming is the chance of drowning. The price of not dreaming is something worse: the certainty of drifting through life half-asleep, locked inside the expectations of our culture, our families, our time.

And maybe the hardest part is not chasing dreams, but discerning which ones are truly ours. Not the second-hand ambitions of our parents. Not the costumes of our heroes. Not the scripts our culture tells us to follow. But the ones that rise from our own marrow.

So I wonder & invite you to contemplate:

💭 When you strip away the world’s definitions of success, when you sit in the messy middle full of uncertainty, what remains true for you?

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For those of you who pre-ordered: Thank you.

Two small words, but they carry the whole weight of my heart.

Your bonus Emotional Wheel, Digital Bookplate, and invitation to the Readers’ Circle will arrive with your book at the end of March. This is not just a book launch. It is a gathering. A remembering. A homecoming.

For those who haven't, and are ready to come home to yourself, pre-order your copy here 

Thank you for walking with me.