The Space Between: Where Identity Takes Shape

A quiet moment. A moving hallway. A reminder that we are shaped not just by what happens—but by how we see.

I was sitting in the hallway at school—hall duty.
A job I never trained for in grad school.
Teens streamed past like a parade of distractions, laughter, and earbuds.
And I started drawing.

Not to make art, really.
Just to see.

I let my pen record the passing shapes—shoulders, sneakers, faces flickering by.
Each line was a kind of listening. A way of saying: You were here. I saw you.
I noticed, in that quiet moment, how two students can walk the same hallway and live entirely different worlds. One anxious. One angry. One smiling at a secret. One barely holding it together.
Same space.
Different stories.

And I realized: what makes us unique isn’t just what happens to us—it’s how we perceive it.
How we interpret it.
How we carry it forward.

We’re not just bodies and memories.
We’re meaning-makers.

Viktor Frankl wrote, “Between stimulus and response, there is a space.”
And in that space, we choose.
That choice—that shaping of perception—is what forms us from the inside out.

Each of us walks through life stitching together a story from what we’ve seen, what we’ve believed, and what we’ve chosen to hold onto.
We all experience loss, joy, confusion, beauty.
But the lens we look through? That’s ours alone.

This is why two people can hear the same words and walk away with opposite conclusions.
Why one person grows bitter and another grows brave.
Why you and I are never quite the same, even when we share the same space.

Living from the inside out means becoming aware of that space.
It means letting Christ shape our lens, not just our behavior.
It’s not about striving to be unique. It’s about being honest about what’s going on inside—
and letting grace rewrite the story we’ve been telling ourselves.

We are not finished beings.
We are living drafts.
Being revised, renewed, rewritten—one surrendered line at a time.

#DoodleForMentalHealth #DrawingAsReflection #ArtAsPresence #MarkMaking #SketchbookTherapy #MindfulDrawing