THE MESSY MIDDLE
What every great hotel (and every great life) shares in common.
Welcome to Issue #029 of Sojourn. Each week, I share two original essays to help you slow down, reconnect, and rebuild with intention (hence ‘sojourn’), in a private community that uses travel as a path to reinvention.
There’s a phase in every transformation that rarely makes it into the story.
Not the moment you begin.
Not the moment you arrive.
But everything in between.
The messy middle.
It’s the season where your energy’s inconsistent.
You open your laptop, but the work doesn’t flow.
You scroll for inspiration, but everything feels forced.
Your routines don’t fit anymore, but you haven’t found new ones yet.
You’re changing, but can’t quite explain into what.
In hospitality, it’s the renovation phase.
The lobby’s closed, the staff are tired of apologizing, and guests keep asking when things will be ‘back to normal.’
But behind the scenes, something truer is forming.
A new sense of direction.
A vision that finally matches what the place was always meant to be.
That’s what the messy middle really is:
A renovation of the self.
You stop pretending the old systems still work.
You start letting go of what once looked successful but never felt right.
And you realize that clarity doesn’t come from more planning, it comes from the cleanup.
From clearing out what no longer fits.
From facing the empty space before it fills again.
It’s like when you finally declutter your home.
Halfway through, it looks worse than when you started… boxes everywhere, shelves undone.
But it’s only in that chaos that you see what’s worth keeping.
The same happens here.
The paint is half done.
The blueprint keeps changing.
The vision looks nothing like the Pinterest board.
But underneath it all, something real is taking shape.
The property that felt ‘off-brand’ becomes the one everyone loves.
And the person who thought she had it all together?
She reinvented herself. (Guilty.)
Because the messy middle isn’t a detour.
It’s the point.
~Ana
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