The Five-Foot Zone

You're five feet deep — not swimming, not sinking, not floating.

Standing, but just barely.

On your tiptoes. Chin tilted high. Breathing, but only just.

You're constantly adjusting. Shifting your weight. Never fully resting.

At first it feels manageable. Safe, even. You tell yourself you're fine here — the water's not that deep. You can touch the bottom. You're not in any real danger.

But the longer you stay, the more exhausting it becomes. Because holding yourself up takes more effort than it looks. Your calves start to burn. Your neck gets stiff.

And eventually, the comfort turns uncomfortable.

I've been here more than once.

When I decided to start ShareVita.org, a non-profit focused on leveraging technology to reconnect communities, I was terrified of leaving my job. Leaving felt like erasing proof I was ever good at something. Staying would have been slow suffocation. Quitting felt like a game of craps — especially when the path I wanted isn't linear but a sideways leap into the unknown. The fear isn't just failing. It's the 2 a.m. spiral: What if I jumped for nothing?

But with startups, the idea won't leave you alone. You've scribbled it in notebooks, pitched it to friends at dinner, researched competitors at 1 a.m. Maybe you haven't started. Because starting means risk. It means telling people what you're building and watching their faces for doubt. It means months of work that might lead nowhere.

So you stay in the five-foot zone — one foot in your job, one foot in the dream, never fully committing to either. You plan instead of build. You read instead of ship. You tell yourself you're being strategic, when really you're just scared.

And then there's the next level of limbo: when you're far enough in that it already costs you something, but not far enough to call it real. When it's still a "side project," but it's eating your nights, your weekends, your attention. When you've shipped enough to know there might be something there — but not enough to feel steady. You hover in that space, half-committed, updating the roadmap, refreshing analytics, telling yourself you're being patient when really you're just afraid.

Going all in means more than quitting a job. It means letting go of the version of yourself that could still say this didn't count. It means attaching your name to something that might fail publicly. It means waking up every day knowing that if this doesn't work, there's no one else to blame. No org chart. No manager. Just you and the thing you chose to build.

And the fear isn't just that it won't work.

It's that you'll give it everything — the time, the focus, the belief — and still come up empty. That you'll jump only to realize you were the only one who thought the water was deep enough to matter. That you'll look back for traction, validation, momentum — and find silence.

So you stay where you are. On your tiptoes. Still technically safe. Still able to walk away. But feeling the quiet drain of never fully committing, never fully knowing.

The thing is, you can't stay on your tiptoes forever.

Your body won't let you. Eventually you either push off and swim, or you climb out and dry off. But the in-between — the "I'll start next month," the half-in — that's what wears you down.

Scared of going deeper. Of fully committing.

And yet.

Equally scared of climbing out. Closing the repo, shutting the laptop, and wondering forever what would have happened if you'd just committed.

What I keep reminding myself is this: even when it feels like I'm jumping in alone, I'm not.

There are people on the deck. Founders who've made the leap and will tell you what the water's actually like. Friends who'll sit with you when it's hard. People who'll answer the phone when you're spiraling, remind you why you started, and let you crash on their couch if everything falls apart.

They don't make the swim painless. But they make it survivable.

And sometimes, knowing you won't drown — even if you come up gasping — is enough to finally let your feet leave the bottom.

I'm still figuring this out. Maybe you are too. Parts of me have toweled off and are writing from the other side — I quit a job that was burning me alive, and hours later I felt lighter than I had in months. But other parts of me are still standing on my tiptoes, chin lifted, wondering if I should peruse LinkedIn jobs.

If you're in the five-foot zone right now, I see you. It's exhausting. But at some point you need to commit — and not just on git.

P.S. Follow my Substak https://substack.com/@getmekaiac?