It feels like it has been forever since I dumped my heart into an email. Sometimes I find I have to step outside of the rush to produce content and just settle into my right to exist on my own timeline. All the tips about growing an internet presence talk about following a strict and consistent schedule. They talk about having a proper brand and theme. They talk about knowing your audience and filling a notable need.
I don’t want to do that.
I do, however, want more people to see what I have to say. My purpose in everything I do has become so intricately tied to the exposition of my inner world. It brings me a lot of joy to share my world, and it is also exhausting to empty myself so frequently and profoundly. Sometimes that emptiness becomes a battlefield of identities; When I put myself on display it is easy to forget that I still must tend to my inner self. Perhaps, I sometimes think, it would do me good to be less permeable, and perhaps that doesn’t even matter.
So today, I am writing to you about liminality, about being unsure and in between and waiting for something you’re not certain will come.
Always more to come…
In the social sciences, the “softer” academic studies, and the arts, there is much to say about the spaces “in between.” We often call these spaces liminal—that which is neither here nor there. Purgatory, if you will. It is the space of both waiting and not knowing, of both being and becoming. It is the present and the past and the coming potential all wrapped up into a feeling of transition. There are more mundane manifestation of liminality, such as waiting rooms or airports, but I more interested in the sensual and and sacred understandings.
The term liminality is used widely across the social sciences, but it really took off after appearing in the writings of Anthropologist Arnold van Gennep (1909). van Gennep talked about liminality in a very specific context of rites of passage and rituals of transition. The study of rites and rituals and the ways in which they vary by culture is a cornerstone of cultural anthropology. Rites of passage are seen in every society. A rite of passage is an activity or event that, simply put, mark a transition from one stage to another. Most often, these rites of passage relate to the induction of a “child” into the world of “adulthood.” Two excellent examples of this would be a quinceañera or a bar mitzvah, where an age of transition is recognized and celebrated, after which the individual is seen differently.
So where does liminality come in? I bet you can guess.
The stages of rites of passage:
Separation—This is the beginning point, when the individual becomes separated from their identity, their social group/class, etc.
Liminality—This is the time in between, when the individual is no longer how they were, and not yet how they will be. (also described in 1969 by Anthropologist Victor Turner as “betwixt and between”)
Incorporation—The individual is welcomed back into the culture, having changed or transformed.
I remember latching on to the idea of liminality when I first read of it. It brings me a lot of comfort to have a way to describe my own experiences as existing in liminal spaces. I also think there is power in a collective reckoning of the power of the in between. Queerness, after all, is a sort of in between—a sort of, I have found power in the undefined, the different, the neither here nor there.
I am of the belief that we all go through micro-transitions multiple times a day. Some even describe sleep, dreaming, as the truest form of liminality.
It is the spaces in between where we may find the ultimate power of our humanity. When we step outside of what we thought we know, who we thought we were, let us leave the door open so that the hauntings of our past may find freedom in the daylight.
Robert Frost speaks so eloquently to this concept in his 1921 poem House Fear
ALWAYS--I tell you this they learned-- Always at night when they returned To the lonely house from far away To lamps unlighted and fire gone gray, They learned to rattle the lock and key To give whatever might chance to be Warning and time to be off in flight: And preferring the out- to the in-door night, They learned to leave the house-door wide Until they had lit the lamp inside.
In this poem, Frost discusses the reintegration phrase. As this family returns to their home, they realize they must signal the inhabitants to “be off in flight,” indicating the removal of the past version of the self in order to welcome in that which has changed.
If we imagine the family in this poem to have left their home, completed a journey, and returned home, would we say that the journey was a waste?
This is what I am getting at. The liminal phase of transition is just as important as the separation or reintegration. The experience of the in-between, of nothingness, of boredom, of not quite knowing where you’re going, is not wasted time. Sitting still is not wasted time. Waiting is not wasted time. Quite frankly, the idea that a human being’s time could be wasted is offensive!
Do what you will as you navigate the complexities of existence. Take time to slow down, to give yourself space to mourn the past and to anticipate the future. Your time in between is meant to be there. You are meant to be still. Even if it is just a moment. There is no special code or secret to passing through the moments of rest more quickly. And if you forget that you deserve to rest, I promise life will remind you.
What I’m consuming these days:
Books: Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
Music: Holding Space by Mayyadda
Thanks for reading. You’re awesome.
With love, always,
Jess