I have spent much of my life chasing defined states—clear, measurable outcomes that let me know exactly who I am.
The title on my LinkedIn profile, the numbers in my bank account, the feeling of winning.
For a while, that clarity came through door-to-door sales.
There was no ambiguity in that world.
You either closed the deal or you didn’t.
You either made money or you went home empty-handed.
It was brutal, but at least it was certain.
The Illusion of Stability: When Defined Paths Disappear
Before that, there was academia.
Another defined space, but one that operated under different rules.
There, it was about knowledge, mastery, proving one’s intelligence within the boundaries of a system that had been in place for centuries.
Success was measured in degrees, publications, and recognition from those who had come before.
The structure was rigid but secure.
Every step had been walked before, and my own path—had I chosen to stay—was mapped out in advance.
I would spend years cultivating a specific kind of intellectual authority, navigating the slow, methodical process of publishing, presenting, and positioning myself within an academic niche.
Then, both of those worlds disappeared.
I left academia and entered sales.
I left sales and entered… what?
The Anxiety of the Unknown: What Comes Next?
Liminality demands that question.
What comes next?
The answer is never immediate, never obvious.
And the waiting—the empty space between the known and the unknown—can feel unbearable.
The instinct, of course, is to grasp at something that will create definition again.
I have done this more times than I care to admit.
After my ex left, I threw myself into work, into making money, as if financial success could serve as evidence that I had moved on.
As if, by proving my value in an objective, quantifiable way, I could erase the part of me that felt discarded.
It was a competition that only existed in my head, one that I never admitted to but lived by all the same.
When I made more than her, I told myself I had won.
When I made less, I felt myself losing something far more than money.
Why Liminal Spaces Are Not a Straight Line to Success
But liminality doesn’t work like that.
It isn’t a bridge between one identity and the next, a simple matter of walking forward until you reach the other side.
There is no guarantee that a new self is waiting, fully formed, at the end of the process.
There is only the process itself.
Liminality is Heidegger’s angst, the dizzying free-fall of realizing that there is no handrail, no external structure imposing meaning.
Sartre would call it the nausea of radical freedom—the realization that you can do anything, be anything, but that nothing compels you to choose.
Kierkegaard, the precursor to them all, called it dread, the vertigo of standing at the edge of infinity, knowing you could jump but not knowing why you would.
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The Chaos of Uncertainty: Losing the Metrics of Progress
The discomfort of being in-between is not just about uncertainty.
It’s about the loss of structure, the loss of the rules that once defined how to measure progress.
In sales, in academia, in relationships—there was always a framework, a way to know if I was succeeding or failing.
Without that, what is left?
Time stretches differently in liminal spaces.
Some days, it feels like nothing is happening, like I am standing still while the rest of the world moves forward.
Other days, there is a strange kind of acceleration, moments of clarity that quickly dissolve back into ambiguity.
There is no linear path.
The past is still close, but the future remains out of reach.
The Lie of Meaning-Making: Not Everything Is a Lesson
I try to remind myself that liminality is not inherently negative.
It is merely the absence of resolution, a space where the story has not yet decided its ending.
But the human mind is terrible at sitting with ambiguity.
We crave closure, definition.
We want to know where we are going and why.
When those answers are unavailable, we panic.
I think about the physical places that mirror this state of transition—airports, train stations, hotel rooms.
Places where people pass through but do not stay.
They are designed to be temporary, to facilitate movement rather than settlement.
And yet, in those spaces, life is still happening.
Lost in Transit: The Paradox of Movement Without Direction
I once spent a night in an airport during a layover gone wrong, sprawled across cold plastic seats, watching people drift in and out of focus.
A fluorescent purgatory of waiting, half-lit and humming.
Business travelers, backpackers, families wrangling exhausted children.
Some people slept.
Some paced.
Some scrolled their phones with that restless, disconnected energy of someone desperate to be anywhere but here.
But here was all there was.
I remember feeling untethered, as if I had slipped outside the normal flow of time.
There was no before, no after.
Only the waiting.
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The Trap of Self-Improvement: When Goals Become Cages
And that is what I come back to when I try to force meaning onto my own liminality.
The temptation is always there—to frame this as a period of growth, to tell myself that soon I will emerge with a new purpose, a new drive, a new understanding of myself.
But the truth is, liminal spaces are not always about transformation.
Sometimes, they are simply spaces.
Kafka once wrote that “a cage went in search of a bird,” and I wonder if that’s what we do when we try to force meaning where there is none.
We construct a framework—call it a purpose, a goal, a five-year plan—and then demand that something come fill it.
But what if nothing does?
What if there is no bird?
You Were Never Fixed: The Illusion of a Final Destination
I used to believe that life was a series of arrivals.
That each phase would culminate in some definitive moment of self-actualization, some final proof that I had become who I was supposed to be.
But if I look at my life honestly, I have never been as fixed as I thought.
The certainty I once had was an illusion, a carefully maintained structure that only lasted as long as I refused to question it.
The roles I played—academic, salesperson, partner—were not the core of who I was, only temporary expressions of something much harder to define.
Sitting in the Discomfort: The Hardest Lesson to Learn
Perhaps that is what makes liminal spaces so difficult.
They do not offer the comfort of identity.
They do not tell you who you are.
Instead, they strip everything away until you are left with the simple, uncomfortable truth: you exist, and that is all.
For a long time, I resisted that truth.
I tried to fill the silence with distractions, with work, with relationships, with any pursuit that would allow me to escape the discomfort of being undefined.
But the more I tried to outrun it, the more it followed me.
Liminal Freedom: What If There’s Nothing to Chase?
It is strange, though, how often the things we fear most turn out to be the things we need to face.
There is a freedom in the in-between, if you are willing to sit with it.
If you stop trying to reach for the next certainty, if you stop demanding an immediate resolution, you might begin to see what is actually there.
And what is there?
The present moment, in all its unsettling, ambiguous imperfection.
We are taught that we must always be striving toward something, that a life without clear goals is a life wasted.
But what if the real work is learning to exist without them?
What if meaning is not something to be found, but something that emerges when we stop searching for it?
Maybe this is why the Zen masters speak in paradoxes.
Why Rilke tells us to “live the questions.”
Why Beckett’s Waiting for Godot ends without resolution.
Maybe the wisdom is in the not-knowing, in the refusal to force an answer where one does not yet belong.
I don’t have answers.
Maybe that is the point.
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