The Week of Limbo, Listening, and Quiet Becoming

Some weeks arrive with a strange stillness, not stagnant, but suspended. A feeling of being mid-air, between what was and what will be, holding your breath while still somehow remembering to move. This week has been exactly that: a liminal stretch of time where everything feels both paused and in motion at once.

On the surface, it’s been a beautiful flow of events: a holiday festival on Saturday, full of light and music and the gentle hum of people gathering for the season. And then the Holiday Market on Sunday, where I stepped into my vendor booth ready for another day of sharing Thrivewell with the community.

But beneath that, something deeper has been moving, and something deeper has been stuck.

I’m in the thick of lease negotiations for the new storefront, a process that has been clarifying, stretching, humbling, and uncomfortable all at once. I still haven’t heard from the owner of the last storefront, and that silence has carried its own weight. These negotiations have required firmness, patience, and a willingness to surrender what I cannot force into form.

It has felt like standing in a hallway between two doors: one potentially opening, one still half-closed, and me doing just enough each day to keep the ball rolling without running too far ahead. It is a fine line, moving forward with confidence in case the green light appears, but not doing so much that the work becomes wasted if I need to pivot… again.

This is not the glamorous part of building something. This is the part where you feel every wobble in your foundation and have to trust yourself anyway. Where surrender becomes a skill. Where you remind yourself that walking away, if it comes to that, does not mean failure, it means alignment.

And somehow, in the middle of all this limbo, something unexpected broke through the stillness.

At both weekend events, in two completely different places, I crossed paths with two published authors whose work centers around children’s emotional worlds, stories about feelings, intuition, energy, and self-understanding. These encounters felt too aligned to ignore, like small cosmic breadcrumbs leading somewhere I hadn’t fully named yet.

I had already been thinking about creating a children’s bookshelf inside Thrivewell, a gentle corner just for them, but meeting both authors back-to-back made that idea feel less like imagination and more like instruction.

Then came the moment that anchored everything.

At the Holiday Market, a group of children wandered up to my booth, completely engrossed in the display, the colors, the textures, the way everything sat at their eye level. They didn’t attempt the Archetype Quiz; the language was too advanced for them. But as I watched them explore, curious and open-hearted, I felt a truth land so clearly it nearly stopped me:

I had nothing to offer them.
And they were the ones who needed it the most.

Because so much of what adults are healing from, myself included, begins in childhood. The confusion. The feelings we didn’t know how to express. The intuition we quieted to fit in. The sensitivity we were never taught to understand.

Standing there, watching those kids take in the table with genuine wonder, I realized Thrivewell could meet them before they start dimming parts of themselves. Before the patterns. Before the wounds. Before the forgetting.

So I did what intuition asked of me: I rewrote the Archetype Quiz in kid-friendly language right there at the market, shaping it into something playful, clear, and age-aligned. And later that night, I refined it at home, letting it become something real.

The children’s archetype cards came next, aligned with the adult pathways, but with activities made for the way kids learn, feel, and grow. And suddenly, in the middle of negotiation limbo, something was unmistakably clear: Thrivewell Kids wasn’t a business decision. It was a soul-level remembering. Children already feel this work. They already sense the energy of it. Now they will have a pathway of their own.

And somehow, creating Thrivewell Kids in the middle of this standstill reminded me of something important: timing may feel uncertain, but alignment never is. If the tools for children arrived this naturally, then the physical home for Thrivewell will arrive with the same clarity, the same unmistakable click of this is it.

So for now, I keep moving, just enough to be ready, just enough to stay aligned, but not so much that I lose sight of the lesson in the limbo.

Thrivewell Kids is ready. And so am I.

Thank you to the two authors who crossed my path so perfectly.
Thank you to the children who reminded me who this work is really for.
And thank you to the part of me brave enough to continue, even in the in-between.

A new branch of Thrivewell has been born, one that honors the child in all of us, and the children growing up now who deserve tools we never had.

With love and the deepest trust in what’s unfolding,
Kelley