Embracing the Gray with Justina Blakeney

What if the in-between is where inspiration lives?

Artist, designer, and Jungalow founder Justina Blakeney is endlessly inspiring. And yes, we talked about creativity, intuition, and learning to follow what “tingles.” But the part of the conversation that Alex and I can’t stop thinking about is learning how to live in the middle.

You know, the gray area. The in-between. The part where nothing is fully clear yet and every atom in your body wants to rush toward an answer just so you can stop feeling uncomfortable.

Most of us have been taught to treat uncertainty like an emergency. The second something becomes unclear, we scramble for answers. We race toward a label, a decision, a definition. We want the relationship to become official or end. We want the career pivot to make immediate sense. We want to collapse our identity into a tidy little box we can point to and say, “There. That’s who I am.”

Personally, I hate living in the gray. I’d rather get a definitive no than sit inside a maybe. The in-between makes me twitchy. But what if…what if…instead of rushing to resolve something, we treated it as fertile ground?

I know. I don’t like it either, but hear me out.

Nature doesn’t bloom year-round. There are seasons where things appear dormant while entire root systems are developing underground. Creativity works like that too. So does personal growth. Some of the most transformative periods of our lives begin as stretches where nothing quite fits anymore.

We’ve both felt this in our own lives and work. As creatives and humans, there’s constant pressure to pick a lane. But living things rarely grow in straight lines. Sometimes the most alive version of you exists in contradiction. Sometimes your next chapter needs room to be weird before it becomes coherent.

Justina said something beautiful about needing to exhale in the middle. You can hold your breath through a hard moment, but you cannot hold your breath through a transformation. At some point, you have to stop treating the in-between like a waiting room and start living inside it.

Because maybe that’s where real creativity lives.

We don’t need to have everything figured out. We just need to stay open long enough for something honest to appear.

I’m trying it this week. I have to admit, it’s uncomfortable. And maybe that’s the point.