The Meantime

If you’ve seen The New Avengers: Thunderbolts, you already know—this isn’t your typical superhero story. These aren’t flawless icons saving the world with certainty. They’re broken leaders, cast out of systems, trying to find purpose as the world around them shifts. They’ve lost titles, trust, and direction. And yet, even in the chaos, they’re being called to rebuild.

That’s the meantime. And most of us are living it right now.

Our current moment gives new weight to a familiar phrase in the Black community: “In the meantime and between time…” Because what a time it is.

There’s no shortage of heartbreak. The news cycles are relentless. Mass layoffs. Policy violence. Sudden goodbyes. Losses that don’t make headlines but shake our lives to the core. We’re not just tired—we’re grieving. We’re not just uncertain—we’re overwhelmed. And still, we’re expected to keep moving. Keep working. Keep producing. Keep pretending we’re fine.

But The Meantime—this uncomfortable, liminal space—isn’t a void to escape. It’s a threshold to reframe.

We’ve been taught to rush through transitions—layoffs, breakups, breakdowns. Bounce back. Stay grateful. Look ahead. But The Reframe invites us to pause inside the meantime and ask what the moment is asking of us. We begin to wonder what parts of ourselves are grieving and what’s trying to grow beneath the surface. Because in the meantime, we are not static. We are being shaped. Our thresholds are teachers. And survival isn’t the only thing happening—we’re metabolizing. We’re becoming.

When a role disappears—especially one tied to our identity, our income, our sense of purpose—it can feel like erasure. But The Reframe teaches us: our worth is not in our title. Our value is not in an email signature. And the mission we carry? It will always find a new place to land. This doesn’t mean the grief isn’t real. It just means the grief isn’t the end.

Thunderbolts gives us a different kind of hero story. These heroes aren’t polished or untouchable. They’re exiled. Uncertain. Wrestling with identity and relevance. They’ve been cast out or forced to choose between loyalty and survival. Sound familiar?

The Thunderbolts live in the meantime. Stripped of status, they’re faced with the most important question: who am I without the role? Before they can save anyone, they have to reassemble themselves.

Just like in The Reframe, their power doesn’t come from perfection. It comes from discernment—choosing what to carry forward and what to leave behind. They learn that legacy isn’t about titles—it’s about intention. That purpose doesn’t die with change. And that even in exile, there’s still a path to meaningful impact.

We don’t need to be Avengers to know what it feels like to lose the plot. But maybe the meantime is where we begin our reclamation.

Let’s be clear: reframing the meantime is hard. It takes community. It takes stillness. It takes unlearning the myth that life should always make sense—or feel good.

In the meantime, we slow down. We check in. We unclench. We don’t rush clarity—we prepare for it.

Because if you’re in the meantime right now, you are not broken. You are not behind. You are between.

And the between is not empty. It’s sacred. It’s generative. It’s transformative.

Let’s reframe it—together.