Inside The In-Between

Notes from where identity, image, and systems collide.

There’s a moment that keeps replaying at the edge of my practice. It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t symbolic. It was just me, editing a photo of myself wearing a piece I didn’t create. I didn’t design it. I didn’t stitch it. But the instant I stepped into it, the garment became a conversation.

Not a monologue, a negotiation.

Between the designer’s intention and my body’s response.
Between what the piece wanted to say and what I allowed it to say through me.
Between the identity the cloth carried and the presence I brought into it.

Somewhere in that exchange, something cracked open.

I switched tabs to tweak a tiny UI interaction, just a hover effect, but the curve of the fabric in the photograph refused to leave my mind. A fold became a motion. A shadow became a timing. A posture became a system rule. Suddenly the image wasn’t just influencing my design choices, it was informing them.

That’s when the truth hit, and it hit uncomfortably:

I don’t create clothes.
I create the meaning they carry.

And I’ve been doing that across everything, modeling, photography, writing, software, stitching messages together from tools I don’t fully control.

That’s the moment the in-between stopped being poetic.
It became real.
Not a blend of disciplines.
Not a hybrid identity.
A tension.

Because when you model, you’re never just wearing something, you’re translating it.
The garment has weight, attitude, movement.
You bring intuition, presence, agency.

And the final image?
It’s not the garment.
It’s not you.
It’s the “third thing” created between both of you, a moment that exists only until the shutter clicks.

Photography taught me that.
Modeling reinforced it.
Code made it undeniable, every interface, every system, every script sits in its own in-between.
You didn’t make the raw material, but you decide how it becomes visible.

I didn’t build the cloth, but I shaped its message.
I didn’t invent the camera sensor, but I decided what it captured.
I didn’t write the programming language, but I shaped how it behaved in my hands.

Everything I do is interpretation.
And for a long time, I mistook that for a weakness.

It wasn’t.

It was the actual discipline.

The in-between is an interpretive craft,
a practice of being the vessel, not the factory.

When that clicked, the façade fell apart.
The labels I kept trying to wear, “developer,” “model,” “photographer,” “writer,” all failed to survive the collision.

What remained was something more honest:

the person who stands at the point where things hand themselves over.

Fashion hands itself over to the model.
The model hands themselves over to the photographer.
The photographer hands the frame to the editor.
The editor hands intention to the viewer.
The viewer returns meaning to the work.

And in that loop, that transfer, is where I actually exist.

Not at the beginning.
Not at the end.
Right in the negotiation.

Right in the translation.
Right in the argument between mediums, moods, and truths.

That’s why the in-between in the original article wasn’t aesthetic, it was behavioral.
It was about attention, posture, interpretation.
Understanding that a piece isn’t complete until someone embodies it.

My role isn’t to construct the fabric.
My role is to animate it, interpret it, capture it, and encode its feeling into something shareable.

That’s where the real work happens.

The only artifact I kept from that realization wasn’t a final photo or a polished interface. It was a quiet note I saved in my drafts:

“I don’t create the object.
I create the moment it becomes alive.”

That’s the in-between I live in.
Not the workshop.
Not the runway.
The fleeting space where design becomes identity,
and identity becomes message