Where are you, exactly, in the moment between falling asleep and being asleep?
You can't quite say, can you? You weren't awake anymore. You weren't asleep yet. You were somewhere in between — a place with no name in ordinary speech, a threshold you cross every single night and never remember. There's a word for that in-between place, and it's one of the most quietly powerful words I know: liminal.
It comes from the Latin word limen, which simply means threshold — the strip of stone or wood at the bottom of a doorway, the line you step over to move from one room to another. And a liminal space is any place like that. Not the room you left. Not the room you're entering. The doorway itself. The in-between. The space that only exists because it's between two other things.
Once you have this word, you start seeing liminal spaces everywhere, and they start to feel strange in a way you can't quite explain. Think of an empty airport terminal in the middle of the night — all those chairs, all that light, and nobody in them. A stairwell. A hallway. A parking garage. A waiting room. Places that were never meant to be destinations, only passages. They feel eerie precisely because you're not supposed to stop there. You're supposed to be moving through. To pause in a liminal space is to linger in a place that exists only for leaving.
And it's not just places. Time has its thresholds too. Dawn is liminal — no longer night, not yet day, the sky caught undecided. Dusk, the same. That's why these hours feel so charged, so full of a feeling that's hard to name — hope, or melancholy, or both at once. You're standing in a doorway of time, and something in you knows it. The old world called dusk and dawn the "in-between times," the hours when the boundary between worlds went thin. They weren't being superstitious, exactly. They were noticing something real: that thresholds feel different. That you are more porous, more open, more strange, when you're between two states.
But here's where this word stops being interesting and starts being about your life. Because the most important liminal spaces you'll ever pass through aren't hallways or airports. They're the thresholds of who you are.
Think about the moment you've left one life and not yet arrived at the next. You've graduated but haven't started working. You've ended a relationship but aren't yet whoever you'll be without it. You've left a country and haven't yet belonged to the new one. You've been told the diagnosis but haven't yet become the person who lives with it. You are, in those seasons, liminal. No longer who you were. Not yet who you'll be. Standing in the doorway of your own life, with one room behind you and the next one dark.
And those seasons are disorienting for exactly the reason airports at 3 a.m. are disorienting. You're not supposed to stay here. This is a passage, not a place. And yet sometimes you find yourself stuck in it — waiting for the next room to appear, and it won't, and you have to just stand there in the threshold, neither one thing nor the other, for longer than you ever wanted.
But I want to offer you something gentler about that. Because we treat liminal seasons as pure discomfort — as something to rush through, to get past, to survive until real life resumes. And I understand that. Thresholds are uncomfortable. Identity hates uncertainty. But the threshold is also the only place where change actually happens. You cannot get to the next room without passing through the doorway. The in-between isn't the interruption of your becoming. It is your becoming. The caterpillar doesn't skip the cocoon.
Old cultures understood this. Every rite of passage — every ritual that turned a child into an adult, a stranger into a member, one self into another — had a liminal stage built into it deliberately. A period where you were no longer your old self and not yet your new one. A time in the dark, in the doorway, undefined. They knew you couldn't just leap from one identity to the next. You had to dissolve a little first. You had to stand, unnamed, on the threshold, before the new name could be given.
And I think part of why the modern world finds these seasons so unbearable is that we've quietly abolished the rituals that used to hold them. The old cultures gave the in-between a container — a ceremony, a marked beginning and a marked end, elders who had crossed the same threshold and could say, I know this dark, keep walking. We've kept the transitions but thrown away the containers. So we pass through the biggest thresholds of our lives — leaving home, ending a marriage, burying a parent, becoming a parent ourselves — with no ritual to hold the strangeness, no name for the state we're in, and we conclude that something must be wrong with us for feeling so unmoored. Nothing is wrong with you. You're just standing in a doorway that nobody built you a frame for.
So if you're in a liminal season right now — if you're between chapters, between selves, between the life you had and the life you can't quite see yet — I want you to know that the discomfort you feel isn't a sign that something's gone wrong. It's the exact feeling of standing in a doorway. It's supposed to feel like this. You are not lost. You are in transit. And every real transformation you've ever undergone required exactly this strange, uncertain, threshold time you're in now.
The word doesn't fix it. But naming it changes it. There's a difference between being lost and being in a place called the threshold. One has no shape. The other is a doorway — and doorways, by their very nature, lead somewhere.
Here's what I'll leave you standing in. If the most important changes of your life all happen in the doorway, in the uncomfortable in-between — then what if the liminal season you're most desperate to escape is exactly the room where you're quietly becoming who you're meant to be?
0 Comments