liminal space

how quitting becomes starting

Lemon water saved my life.

The routine of starting each morning with a glass of hot water was my first building block. Over months, I put together scaffolding to change my life. Years later, I see how consistency compounds. 

In a life there are moments when you stop and those in which you start.

Between the two states, there is an undefined duration where the former becomes the latter. Liminal space is this change state. 

Those periods can look like gaps in resumes or creative dry spells, when under the surface, the necessary changes are happening.

Maybe for someone it’s a period of experimentation and trying things, or for someone else, finally taking a break.

It’s boundless and pointless— in the conventional sense, there’s no end date, no KPIs, no OKRs. But these periods are necessary for radical change.

In this case, I made a small change, drinking my silly little lemon water with no sense of how I would ever make the big changes. 

How could I ever quit my job, heal my eating disorder, get out of toxic relationship patterns, or move to Spain? 

I didn’t know where to start, so I sat in that liminal space, having no idea what it would eventually become. I quietly explored, gathering information that I had no idea would be useful. There were no big fireworks of “progress” and achievement.

Context is essential to understand liminality. 

I started drinking lemon water to help become less dehydrated and anxious, and then it became my go-to drink in early days of sobriety. 

I picked up interior design out of the necessity of renting an unfurnished apartment. Then, I met my boyfriend, who loves remodeling and real estate. Now, we dream of renovating a villa to start a bed-and-breakfast. 

In the liminal space, I collected the things I needed for the next chapter. But in the moment, I had no idea what they were.

The opportunity in liminal space is revealed only if you can sit long enough in the empty space before something becomes, instead of rushing into something that already is.

If you can endure, you leave the room for miracles to emerge.

Being in liminal space is deeply uncomfortable. It can feel like living for months in an endless free fall, grimacing in anticipation for some horrible thing that has yet to come.

For years, I avoided anything that felt like this. I went from one certain point to another, on a well-defined path.

Get good grades, go to a good college, get a good job, live in the right neighborhood, get the best promotion. I had no liminality.

If I was in transition, it was from one known point to another. I was never in the unknown for too long.  

This changed in the past two years, when I realized that the only way I’d be able to make big changes is if I stepped out of the comfort of certainty. 

I’ve stepped into liminal space and it has been in many ways excruciating.

I have sobbed face down on the wood floor of my furniture-less flat. I have sat through bad dates and not fun parties without reaching for a drink to numb myself. I have cried on the phone to an accountant as I try to figure out international taxes. 

Many times, I have wanted to escape. 

I’ve considered that I could move back, I could restart my old job, I could pick up drinking again.

In the deepest moments of despair, stepping back into what I knew, and hated, seemed more appealing than pushing blindly in the excruciating anxiety of the undefined. 

But I grip myself tighter. I stomp my feet and commit anew to newness. I re-anchor into the liminal space, of what could be, but is not yet. 

Everyday I choose to stay.

The greatest gift that liminal space has given me is that I can’t have imposter syndrome in my own life. 

 If you’re able to endure the liminal space longer than anyone else has been able to, you see things that no one else has before. 

As much as I’m frustrated that there’s no one who can give me an easy answers, sometimes I stop and consider just this. 

No one can tell me how to do it because no one else has done it. 

What a miracle. What an opportunity. 

So when I come across an idea that feels obvious, I get excited. Because even if someone else perceived it, no other person has been poised to step into it. 

Perhaps, this is for me.  

It’s true that the longer I sit in the unknown and the more things I take on without easy answers, the more uncomfortable I become.

I want to scream and throw myself on my bed and give up completely.

But when I sit in this state one minute longer than I thought I could bear, when I break through that feeling I never imagined would pass, I feel deep peace.

The context comes in. 

I see why it had to be exactly this way. I inventory the tools I picked up along the way.

Ah, that’s what this was for. That’s why I had to learn it this way. 

With clarity, I take one step forward. Eventually, the liminality drowns the noise away. 

All that remains is signal.

In this place, at the crux of all the winding paths and choices made, all those wrong turns and roads taken, where precisely only you went, lies the opportunity. 

This is for you.  

It could only be for you.