Liminal Space
In-between things inside and out
I’m in between chapters in a few things these days: my running, my writing, my growth, my ability…ah hell. My personhood. This place is confusing and erratic and without handholds and I know that’s the purpose but I also wish for certainty. I feel sea sick.
Three weeks ago I got the amazingly great news that I can run again from my ortho PA. I have been a runner for twenty years, with time away only for injury or recovery. The longest time by far was the lead up to my hip replacement and the recovery from that- 18 long months- mid February 2022 until July 2023.
I’m getting to know running again. Sometimes while I’m plodding away I want to stop people and explain who I actually am as a runner- that I have cred and a long history. I’m not what I might appear to be: slow and inexperienced. I want to stop people and say, “I had a full hip replacement a year ago and look at me now! I’m running! I have been a runner for twenty years, not twenty minutes!” I thought about getting a t-shirt made, or maybe printing out cards. This is what I think about when I’m running now: explaining who I was before.
My writing is like this too- I have felt like I don’t know how to hold a pencil or write in a way that I like and even my morning pages have fallen off the side until this morning when I made myself sit through them. I have felt like writing makes me itch and allergic to myself. I recall the days when I would just sit down and the words would pour out and I trusted them like a child. I feel like a jaded old person, suspicious of anything new.
My personhood. I have been attached to an idea of who I am for a very long time. Lately in therapy I am seeing a new person emerge and I am suspicious of that too. I speak my brain and I feel trust. I hide less and less, then not at all. I hold my integrity and it is a treasure, not an accusation. I feel like I know myself more deeply and within that is a stranger I don’t know well at all.
Is this personal alchemy? This liminal space that leaves the shore and swims for shore all at once? Inside I feel like I’m on the show Supermarket Sweep and I have only a few minutes to dump things into my personhood cart and dash for the check out, god I hope I remember to get the right stuff!!! But in reality I’m in slow motion, in the quicksand of growth and shed. I am slow like a snake gliding out of my old skin, and I miss my old skin so much even though I am still in it.
I spent some time looking through old running photos. I didn’t know how beautiful I was then, and my guess is I don’t know it now. Is that guess the thing that saves me from ever being sure? I mean that in a good way, or maybe a neutral one. Being sure can be great but it can also stifle you and box you up tight. Unknown is so full of possibilities. In those pictures above you see a runner, but what you don’t see is the massive transformation from one me to another me. The things you don’t know mean you can’t tell the differences in 2009 me (totally hungover and training for a marathon during one of my biggest rock bottoms), 2012 me ( during another big rock bottom, 2 months away from quitting drinking forever ), and 2021 me (9 years sober and on my first solo camping trip, running the same race as 2012). It looks like the same person in every photo, but it’s not.
There’s something about the unification of past and present, my internal blender on high. I’ve done enough work to know this liminal place is frustrating and scary and also the place where you live more life if you stop resisting and can go towards the unknown. Who was I before? Can I get used to the idea that I’m living with a stranger, who isn’t a stranger but is me, a person I have grown into but can’t quite see? If this sounds confusing it is, and it is also…good. I can be uncertain, and it makes sense to me.
I have learned to have compassion for the woman in those photos. To find comfort in the liminal space, of the shedding, of this and that. What she didn’t know yet I wish I could tell her, but I don’t think she would believe me. The future speaks a language the past can’t understand.