Processing a time of great interruption in my life. Standing in that space, feeling my body, my mind, and struggling to get a real sense of the form or dimensions of this space. With time, and shifting perspectives, I can glance back at it, make sense of it, and then move forward with my life.

Audio of “The Shape of the In-Between”

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I’ve been thinking lately about the idea of liminal spaces. At first, what comes to mind is a general period of transition—but the feeling of it is decidedly not neutral. There’s no clear shape to it; it’s disorienting, uncomfortably ambiguous. The boundaries are unclear. Instead of stepping off a thing and onto the next thing, you find yourself falling—or maybe floating, spinning, swirling. You’ve fallen, and you haven’t landed. Maybe it isn’t clear which way is up or down. Your body feels strange or numb, like when your ears are plugged at a high elevation and the world continues around you, sounding foreign and gauzy. You look around to read the expressions on other people’s faces, like children do, trying to assess the severity of the state in which you find yourself.

I’m thinking about the sense of panic induced by getting stuck in this space—or maybe the freedom of it. If you’re stuck, you can’t be expected to function properly in your life. You can withdraw to private spaces without needing to apologize. It’s movement, but it’s not forward movement. Nor is it backward movement. Is this movement useful? I don’t know. Who decides? Does it only become useful in retrospect—as a reference point for determining whether future movement is forward, sideways, or otherwise?

It’s like being in a dream, when everything is weird, but of course it is. My dreams are always weird, but I don’t recall ever having thought the weirdness is weird while I’m dreaming it. It’s only when I’ve woken up that I decide the dream was weird. It’s only later that I tell someone about this weirdness, but my words never quite capture the experience.

What does this space look like, if I try to render it with ink, cloth, wool, or thread? Is it a line, a road, something squiggly? A scribble, perhaps? An intersection or convergence? Is there order to it? I’m thinking of those curious shapes I made long ago, in a miniature version of myself, with my spirograph. So maybe it’s mathematical. There is a sense, an order to all things, regardless of our perception. Right? It takes time to make sense of it. You have to stay with it long enough for the shape to emerge. The sense is there. The shape is there. One’s perception of it may be sharp or obtuse—or maybe just scrambled. Can it feel amusing, though? Maybe a little? Like a free pass to disengage from life or discharge certain responsibilities? I’m not sure it always feels bad. I just know it mostly feels bad.

I suppose it’s easier to accept if, like anything else, you get to choose when to enter and exit this liminal space. Like a train—you hop on and hop off when it suits you. Even better if you get to control the temperature of the train car, what your body is (or isn’t) wrapped in, what you smell, what you taste, what you see around you. Who you feel. But when you don’t have that choice? Or worse—when you do have the choice but don’t realize it? If you grow tired of the bitter taste in your mouth, your puffy, pallid reflection, the uncomfortable stares of people avoiding your eyes—or the toxic positivity that impales you from those who simply don’t know what else to say? This is, I suppose, how you come to understand whether you were subjected to a liminal space or had some agency in entering or leaving it.

Maybe that’s the distinction. Or maybe it doesn’t matter, as long as you eventually emerge—into or onto the next thing—where you can reflect and decide how to bracket that time in your mind. Or ceremonialize it.

I think that’s what I’m doing, actually. I think I’ve arrived at (in?) the next thing, and I keep glancing back, just to check that it’s really behind me. The shape of the in-between has started to come into focus. I want to look at it, decide what I think about it, and then be done with it already. No looking back. No more looking back. Seems like a pretty reasonable thing to do. But I do have a tendency toward sentimentality and nostalgia—even for the weird things. And maybe what’s worse: it’s one of my favorite things about myself.

Something to investigate, anyway. Some of my best thinking is done with needle and thread in hand. Every little stitch becomes a stepping stone of my pondering—which, I now realize, is itself a kind of liminal space. Wandering around in that space, looking for the boundaries and the foothold of the next thing. I’m going to try it and see. I’m so curious what it will look like.