In Between Tables

Real Setbacks. Real Tools. A Table of Your Own.

If you feel like you're behind, the problem isn't you. It's the scoreboard you're using.

In Between Tables is a self-help book built around the exact moment most people feel least equipped for it: turning eighteen, walking out of high school, and being handed an entire adult life to figure out with no instructions. Through seven real turning points, a roommate crisis, a hidden illness, an ACL tear (twice), the book hands you a specific, usable Table Rule out of each one: a tool for the exact moment comparison starts running the show.

This is a book for anyone starting college, anyone a few years out, and anyone who feels like everyone else got handed a seat at the adult table while they're still building theirs from scratch, still figuring out what their twenties are actually supposed to look like without a script.

Paige Hlivka is heading into her junior year of college, applying to dental school, and building her own company on the side, which means these strategies weren't developed in hindsight from a place of arrival. They were built in the middle of it, starting at eighteen, tested in real time against a torn-up plan and a phone full of everyone else's highlight reel. That's the case she makes throughout: you don't have to have it figured out to already be building something real.

Learn how to:

• stop tracking other people's growth and start planting your own garden instead;
• recognize that surviving already counts as being an adult, no invitation required;
• read a setback, an injury, or a rock-bottom moment as a signal instead of a failure;
• mute someone else's highlight reel before it starts writing your own story;
• separate your worth from the price tag attached to your goals;
• stop competing with everyone else's timeline and start pitching your own ability to pivot;
• build your own table instead of waiting for a seat at someone else's;

...and much more.

In Between Tables will reshape the way you think about being "behind," whether you're heading into your first year of college at eighteen, rebuilding after a hard freshman year, or just trying to figure out which version of adulthood is actually yours to build.

She was never behind. She just hadn't built her table yet. Neither have you, yet.