๐งต The Last Time I Wrote This Newsletter...
I was about to get married (!!!).
I was fairly confident I had built enough systems as an entrepreneur that my business could survive one to two weeks without me. I was wrong.
A little context: I'm 36, South Asian, and Muslim. Getting married "this late in the game" carries weight in my community that some of you might already understand. For all the reasons you might imagine, my engagement was only five months long: family, religion, age, and the general sense that we needed to just...do the thing.
What I was most unprepared for was the transition that comes after getting married, especially in such a short timeframe. Nobody talks about it. I thought I was ready so I certainly didn't prepare for it. So what really happens after all the hoopla?
My husband and I 'Muslim dated' before getting married, which means the week after our wedding, we were figuring out how to cohabitate, co-grocery shop, co-clean, and co-everything-else for the first time, and all at once. Fun fact, we also both somehow got COVID the day we got back from our mini-moon!
I was still paying vendors, doing Amazon returns, coordinating a temporary move into his place before we looked for a place together, drinking chicken soup, and trying to mentally process the fact that I had just planned a fusion Indian-Palestinian wedding in five months, while a genocide was happening in real time, and managing the particular kind of chaos that comes with a big cultural family wedding.
Yup. A mouthful. A brain-ful. A heart-ful.
I collapsed. Not dramatically...(okay, maybe a little dramatically.) But I kind of just...got lost, quietly, completely, and in every direction. Even the things I did on autopilot, like writing this newsletter, went out the window.
๐ง Inside This Issue
If you're new here, ๐๐ฝ welcome.
This is The Messy Middle, a newsletter about the leadership journey no one tells you about. I'm Arshiya Kherani, an executive and founder coach & speaker, and I write about the things most people skip in professional spaces: identity shifts, the hard work of building something honest in public, and what it actually takes to lead with clarity when life is anything but clear.
This week: what collapse taught me about rest, identity, and what it really means to come back.
๐ก On The Messy Middle
In a world overly obsessed with growth mindset, I increasingly find myself in spaces where we talk a lot about the beginning, the vision, the launch, the leap. And we love the end, the milestone, the pivot, the glow-up. But...nobody really prepares you for the in-between, do they? The part where the systems you built stop working. Where the version of yourself that got you here isn't quite who you need to be next. Where you're not broken, exactly, but you're not quite whole either.
That's where I was for the past several months. Not quite in a honeymoon, but not quite down in the dumps. All of a sudden I became a wife. And all of a sudden, I was overwhelmed with how that related to all of my other identities, including business owner.
Somewhere in the middle of all of it, I realized: this is the thing nobody talks about. The moment after the milestone. The collapse after the celebration. The silence after the announcement. The rebuilding that happens off-camera. I kept waiting for someone to understand it, to validate it...and eventually it clicked: this is exactly what I do for my clients.
So here I am. Back at it, with a new name for what we've been doing all along in this weekly series: The Messy Middle.
๐ Where I've Been
In the months after the wedding, karma did its thing. Three inbound clients came my way. I found a business coach I love. And without any of them fully knowing it, they restored me. Helping them helped me find my footing. The conversations, the clarity I was facilitating for other people and finding with my own coach, the work itself, it pulled me back into myself.
That's the thing about the Messy Middle. You don't think your way out of it. You move your way through it. Sometimes the act of showing up for someone else is what reminds you that you're still capable of showing up at all, that you have knowledge, skills, and your experience to fall back on when your energy is running low.
The leaders I work with know this feeling. The founder who closes the round and then doesn't know what to do with herself. The exec who gets the title and realizes the job description was never the hard part. The communicator who is brilliant in a room but freezes the moment someone says "tell me about yourself."
We all have a moment where we collapse, where things get a little messy, where we've lost the plot.
What I've come to believe is that this IS the leadership journey. Not a detour from it. Leadership isn't a place to get to, but a series of messy loops that leave us with the wisdom to lead over time.
That's what this newsletter is for: this exact messy middle. Every week, we name what's hard, and figure out what's next.
๐ฃ Work With Me
In my time away, I've been quietly rebuilding how I work with people. Here's where I'm focused right now:
Storytelling For Influence: A session for teams and organizations to learn how to cultivate and utilize professional storytelling for growth. Delivered to 1,000+ leaders across sectors. Lโearn more about corporate trainings here, or reply to this email to chat.
1:1 Coaching: For values-driven leaders navigating a pivot, a leap, or a Messy Middle of their own. Book a call or just reply to this email. We'll figure out together which path makes sense.
๐ฅจ Snacks:
๐ง TV: So, so late to the game, but I finally watched Breaking Bad and am now on to Better Call Saul. (Is this my actual new favorite series?!) There's more messy middle leadership lessons in those than you can imagine. Here's one that stuck with me.
๐ Chilly Conditions: Specifically at airports...and this might be why.โ
๐
The snack-iest snack of all...because I know a lot of y'all personally, I'm sharing one lil wedding photo here! I co-dreamt this outfit with an incredible designer in Pakistan (this is not out of the ordinary in South Asian culture!). Many brides wear reds at their wedding, but I have always been drawn to the colors of the sunset. So, we combined all the best shades of orange and pink, and even though my co-designer resisted it at first...she pulled it together beautifully. The whole day feels like a blur looking back, but I loved setting up for this photo to do the dress justice. ๐งฟ
Good to be back, see you in next week's mess!
Arshiya
โ