(Ed. Note: there are no answers in this essay, just thoughts and ideas)

I’ve been feeling an increasing sense of what I can only describe as liminality recently. I don’t mean that in any sort of dystopian way, like the world is becoming one big waiting room for Armageddon or something—rather it’s a feeling that I inhabit a sort of liminal reality of my own. Or that I am that liminal reality.

I even wrote a character in my novel with these same sorts of feelings, albeit on a much grander scale in her case.

It’s somewhat of an extension of a line of thinking I started and let get played out years ago that my role is to help other people complete their stories, rather than constructing my own lived story.

A kind of human marginalia.

When I look back to my childhood and young adult years through this lens, many things become clearer, as do some of my present behaviors. This whole line of inquiry was brought back to the foreground by this piece by Mo Perry. Go read it, please, it’s awesome. I’ll wait.

In quotes like this:

“In acting classes, young performers are taught something called Neutral Mask — how to make themselves a blank slate, free of any distinctive gait or physical characteristics.”

I see liminality laid out in an approachable way anyone can see and understand. Young actors are taught to do something many of us do every day without realizing it, exist in the space between.

I feel like the idea of liminality gets a bad rap in the broader culture. Do a quick internet search for the word and what you’ll see is mostly creepy pictures of creepy places. Liminal spaces are transitional. They exist and, at the same time, don’t. They are those places we travel through on our way to somewhere else.

Everyday examples would include parking lots, entry halls, and the sidewalk between your car and the front door. Waiting rooms, security lines, and even hallways are further examples that might resonate.

A liminal space is anywhere that is no longer the place you left, but not yet the place you’re going.

Labeling a place has the same impact as labeling a person. It provides us with a convenient heuristic that helps us know how we should prepare to inhabit that space. The label tells us how comfortable we should or should not be there.

What about labeling stories? Can identifying a storyline as yours help someone else know what role they’re supposed to play? How does that story differ from the reality you see in front of you? What about situations where two people interact? Is that moment yours, or theirs? Mo again:

“What does it take to change the story you live within? First I suppose you need to see it for what it is — be able to discern it as a story in the first place, and not just the fabric of reality.”

That represents a level of clarity I’m not sure most people have, at least not on an ongoing basis. It takes an understanding of the role our brains play in how we perceive reality, vs how much of that reality originates in our brains. It also takes an ability to step back from these seemingly mundane daily interactions and look at them from a different perspective.