Betweenward is a place for people who have always been the one who figures it out. This time, they’re not sure how.
We call this space the in-between: after what was, and before what’s next. Most of the people who end up here didn’t stumble into change by accident. They’ve been through it before, more than once, and they got good at it. They decided fast, adapted, and moved forward before anyone had to ask twice.
That’s exactly why this time feels different. The old method isn’t working the way it used to, and when it doesn’t, it can feel like proof that something in you has given out.
It hasn’t. You’re in the in-between, and it deserves a pause, even when it doesn’t feel comfortable yet.
The people who live here are called in-betweeners. What we leave for each other along the way is cairns: small markers that say someone crossed here before you and found their footing. You’ll find them everywhere here. They’re in essays, in stories readers send us, in conversations we record with people willing to say what the in-between actually felt like from the inside.
The Ripple Journey is the framework that shapes much of what we do here. It doesn’t tell you what to do next. It names the stages you’re moving through, so the disorientation itself stops feeling formless: the drop, the widening rings after, and what eventually settles. María built it from her own lived experience, and from years of walking with people through transitions that outlast the news of them.
The people behind it
Betweenward is co-founded by Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D., and María Tomás-Keegan.
Jerry catches the exact moment an institution quietly stops keeping its promise to the people inside it — when a role, a rank, or a title still gets performed long after it’s stopped meaning what it used to. Twenty-three years in the Marine Corps trained that instinct before he had language for it. A combat engineer walks the site before anyone breaks ground, and Jerry reads institutions the same way, checking what’s actually holding before anyone builds on top of it.
A doctorate in Organizational Change and Leadership from USC Rossier, and the years since teaching at UC Irvine’s Division of Continuing Education, gave him the research and the vocabulary to back up what his instincts had already caught. He writes about identity, work, and what happens to people the system stops seeing.
María is a certified transformational coach known for working with people whose competence is no longer enough. They’re the ones who’ve always been certain of their next move and, this time, can’t see it. Sometimes that’s a career: a role that ended, a title that no longer applies, an industry that stopped needing what they built. Sometimes it’s a season of life no résumé prepares you for: caregiving, an empty house, a diagnosis, a marriage that isn’t what it was.
The Ripple Journey grew out of the same pattern showing up in both rooms: capable people, thrown less by the change itself than by their own inability to push through it the way they always had before.
What you’ll find here
There’s no required order to any of this. If you want to sit with the condition itself, start with the essays — identity, transition, what it means to become someone you haven’t met yet. If you’d rather follow the shape of the whole thing from the beginning, the Ripple Journey series takes you from start to finish.
Cairns from the Community hold what other readers have left behind. Read a few, or come back once you’re ready to leave your own. We also sit down with in-betweeners willing to say, on the record, what this actually felt like from the inside in Oral Histories. Those conversations live here too.
And because the in-between doesn’t stay in one part of life, you’ll find writing that follows it into specific corners as well: work and career, the body and how it moves through change, and what it means to navigate artificial intelligence when the rules keep changing faster than anyone can teach you.
If after spending some time here, you’re still standing in that quiet stretch between what you used to be and what you haven’t become yet, especially if you’re the one holding it together for everyone else, you’re not passing through.
You’re already one of us.
So, subscribe if that’s you. And when you read something that meets you exactly where you are, click the ❤ and leave us a comment. We read and respond to every one.
We invite you to leave a marker here today. Someone right behind you will thank you.
