Living In-Between: Identity, Belonging, and the Space No One Talks About (Part Two)

Itzel Yagual, PhD(c)
Nov 24
4 min read

Capacity Debt™: Why Women Leaders Keep Paying Invisible Bills

Opening Insight

Living in-between is not confusion. It’s not dilution. It’s not brokenness.It’s adaptive navigation — a way of moving that builds identity fluency where others only see misfit.

For neurodivergent, culturally complex women, it’s the unseen labor of translating yourself across contexts while protecting your wholeness. Too often, that labor is dismissed as inconsistency or over-sensitivity. But in reality? It’s strategy. And strategy deserves to be honored.

If You Missed Part One

This is part two of a larger conversation. If you missed the opening piece, read it here:👉 Living In-Between: Identity, Belonging, and the Space No One Talks About

The In-Between Experience

When I say in-between, I mean existing in spaces where you’re never fully claimed, yet always categorized.

As a mixed woman with Afro/Black, Indigenous, Panamanian, and Spanish heritage, I’ve lived this at home and at work.
As a late-diagnosed neurodivergent woman, I’ve lived this in my own body and brain.

In both spaces, the same tension shows up: misfit. The pressure to perform belonging while privately managing the exhaustion of translation.

Teaching Moment: Defining In-Between

In-Between (Identity term): A lived state of carrying multiple cultural, neurological, or role identities that don’t fit neatly into dominant categories.It isn’t indecision. It isn’t dilution. It’s adaptive navigation in a world addicted to either/or.

What the research and practice say:

I/O psychology frames this as person–culture–role misfit, which produces vigilance, fatigue, and withdrawal — not because you’re broken, but because the context is narrow.
Feminist and identity scholarship surfaces the hidden labor: scanning for safety, managing projections, being read before you’re heard.
In practice, women in-between develop rare forms of lived agility: translation, boundary work, and context-switching. That’s leadership fluency.

Mini-Tool: The In-Between Navigation Grid™

(Lite public version — safe for sharing)

A quick framework to help women recognize the dimensions of their “in-between” identity and transform them into vantage points.

A Personal Vignette

Years ago, in a leadership meeting, I was told I was “too quiet” to be effective. What my manager couldn’t see was that I was listening across layers: reading the cultural undertones in the room, tracking the body language of two women who hadn’t spoken, and noticing how deadlines were being set without accounting for real capacity.

Silence wasn’t absence. It was strategy. When I did speak, I named the risks and reframed the plan. Two months later, that very shift prevented a project collapse. What they read as a deficit was actually contextual leadership.

Takeaways & Tools for the In-Between

Claim the Both/And – Refuse either/or reductions. You can hold many truths without apology.
Name Your Non-Negotiables – Cultural, neurodivergent, and personal. Write them down and enforce them.
Use Your Vantage Point – In-between sharpens perception. Leverage it as decision-making power.
Build Your Own Belonging – Curate spaces where your whole self fits; don’t wait for institutions.

Applied Leadership & Solopreneurship

Psychologists call this cultural mismatch. What they often miss is the emotional toll: the questioning, the scanning for safety, the ache of being both visible and invisible at once.

For women like us, in-between isn’t weakness — it’s a strategic lens that fuels leadership.

That’s the very lens I built The Unfolding Room™ from. Not by trying to contort myself into systems, but by designing new ones that reflect lived complexity. My solopreneurship isn’t about surviving narrow rooms. It’s about building rooms that breathe.

From the Desk of an I/O Psychology Consultant & Identity Strategist

If you’ve ever been told you’re “too much,” “too inconsistent,” or “hard to place,” know this: those same critiques are often the markers of rare leadership fluency.

In I/O psychology, we don’t frame recalibration as failure — we frame it as feedback. Your system is signaling what the context refuses to acknowledge. That signal deserves leadership, not shame.

What’s Next

This conversation isn’t over. And here’s a preview of where we’re heading next: In the upcoming newsletter, I’ll dive into the theme of Cultural Backlash & Role Conflict — what happens when the very communities we belong to push back against our leadership, ambition, or identity choices.

Stay with me in this work. We’re not just surviving — we’re re-designing. I’m also gathering truths that rarely get asked for.

If you’ve lived the in-between, I’d value your voice:👉 The Mixed Women with Black Heritage Survey is open now. It’s a space to anonymously share your experiences of leadership, work, and cultural complexity when one of your identities includes Black/Afro heritage. Your insights will inform future Unfolding Insights™ issues and help shape consulting frameworks that speak directly to us.

Want more from the newsletter?

With you in the nuance,

Itzel

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Disclaimer: The content of this newsletter is provided for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute medical, legal, financial, or therapeutic advice. Use of this material does not establish a client–consultant relationship. All proprietary concepts, including Identity Intelligence™ and related frameworks, are the exclusive intellectual property of The Unfolding Room™. Unauthorized use, reproduction, or distribution of this material, in whole or in part, is strictly prohibited and may result in civil and/or criminal liability.