Mind the Gap: Liminal Spaces in Creative Living

You will survive the liminal spaces. What's on the other side is more beautiful than anything you could imagine. But the spaces between can also be beautiful.

You are not meant to have all the answers yet; you are meant to experience the spaces in between what is falling away from you and what you are moving toward. But your new life is going to cost you the old one.

Grieve.

Let Go.

Rise through the rubble of your crumbling past.

Rebuild.

Find joy.

I keep hearing this message floating up through the cracks of my foundation and whispering to me in the quiet corners of my inner knowing. I don't know what to do with this information. I guess … nothing.

Be patient. There is a point to all of this, I hear.

Here I am, untangling and unraveling this in-between phase with you in case you, too, are not sure where your life is leading. Maybe you’re even feeling unworthy without the proverbial bird-in-hand when there was “nothing” in the bush.

You will notice throughout that I put quotation marks around words that are open to interpretation based on our subjective experience. Here, there probably isn’t “nothing” in the bush. The quotation marks ask you to question the use of that word and ask yourself if it is actually true.

Empty hands in these seemingly “empty” spaces.

After all, society says we only matter if we have a job, a title, accomplishments or a partner. It wasn’t long ago that women didn’t have any societal value without a husband and children.

Today, both men's and women’s worth are measured in equal parts to our productivity within a system that isn’t always benevolent. Says who? Have you ever asked yourself this? Who gets to determine our worth?

To be empty-handed in this materialistic world can cause us to doubt ourselves in all the ways.

Don’t believe that lie, my darling.

This space in between feels like being in a room so quiet that your ears start to ring from the noise of the previous room you just left. So much noise. I didn’t know how cacophonous those rooms were until I stepped out and entered this new space.

After existing in this space for nearly four years, the ringing and agitation have settled, and an inner voice, my true voice, has started to rise out of my heart in chorus with the universe as its pulse echoes the beat of my own heart.

She will sing to you: Come this way. I have something so much more beautiful waiting for you.

“In the domain of the Queen, you must find your true center alone. Sovereignty shows you how to hold the moving edge of who you know yourself to be and approach the horizon of who you are to become,” says the Wild & Sacred Feminine Deck by Niki Dewart and Elizabeth Marglin.

I pulled this card two days after posting this and knew I had to add and update it when I saw it. The guidebook continues to say that we are not what happened to us but what we choose to become, and we make that choice daily. We abdicate our throne to our lives when we let others make choices for us and validate our worth.

But after leaving the noise of constant external validation in my career and walking away from invalidating partners, I am left with a holy emptiness, a cup that is me to fill with my soul, and I have no idea where this is all leading.

Next steps don’t seem to appear until after I leap. It’s often terrifying. But it is also thrilling. I thought it would end after that first leap into the dark chasm of infinite unknowns, but I am learning this is the way of the heart-led life. I am learning that what makes the next step appear in perfect time is your faith in yourself, in the process, and in the vision you hold for what’s next.

I am more alive and live with a depth and freedom I have never experienced before, but I am consistently uncomfortable. It has been like this since January 2022, my first month of freedom after I cut the desk chains to a 9-6 windowless office job in a fluorescent-lit cave inside a windowless newsroom inside a windowless building built in 1965. Have you ever seen Joe Versus the Volcano (1990)? It’s a classic worth renting. This was something like that.

Some casualties along the way—a paycheck, predictability, decent health insurance, security, consistency and my society-approved title as a college journalism instructor. A year from that moment, I would also have walked away from my other title as executive editor.

So many lessons wrapped up in the loss of my titles. I heard once that our ego is like a cysthalis that wraps us in our beliefs, world-focused identity, titles, names and associations, but that our true self is somewhere underneath that. The many humbling and devastating losses we experience remove layers of who we thought we were. Then, we become.

The woman I am today doesn’t care one bit that I no longer have an impressive work title. I smile thinking about the growth I have experienced here.

Six months ago, I was asked to consider a position as an executive editor at a big metropolitan lifestyle magazine. The salary was good, the benefits were better, and the office was beautiful. However, the mission was not aligned with mine, so I declined.

The job appealed to the part of me that is dying into a new form, but it didn’t appeal to who I am becoming. If I want to create real change, I owe it to myself to be honest — I can no longer pander to the ad sales department of a magazine that has questionable ethics and writes about interior design and floral styles for Spring.

I am finished trying to fit into small spaces because it makes others more comfortable and appeals to my false sense of security in the corporate world.

But what was I thinking? I am a single mom who needs an income.

Yes, I have lost my mind. But I have found my heart. I guess that is progress from the woman who found purpose in answering the very American introductory question at parties: “So what do you do?”

If I were to look over the last few years, on the surface, I could observe that nothing major has happened in my career. Yes, I have published a few news magazine pieces. Yes, I do contract work editing. Yes, I quietly launched my own business, but I am still not sure what shape it will take.

But underneath the surface of societal happenings, everything has changed. Everything. I am not the same woman.

I have lost everything. I have gained everything.

Not where I once was and not yet where I hope to land.

I thought about words and phrases synonymous with this space between when we are neither here nor there to help me understand my existence in this in-between space. Like most people, language helps me understand and process my experiences.

Here is what I came up with:

becoming

rites of passage

uncomfortable

quiet

liminal space

letting go

metamorphosis

incubation period

stillness

transition

unfolding

in progress

uploading

downloading

arriving

leaving

upgrade

shifting

removing blocks

waking up

in flux

searching

the fertile void

calm before the storm

calm after the storm?

finding

emerging

standing at the threshold

the bridge between selves

mind the gap

blank canvas

golden era

empty

barren

transformation

newness

lost

found.

(Feel free to add more in the comments.)

Some days I am knee-deep in gratitude for this phase. Like I get to snuggle up next to my golden retriever Peanut while Miles Davis plays in the background as I work, and I get to burn candles and write my book, work on client stuff whenever I want, meet my friends for long lunches, take long walks, pick my son up from school and hear about his day on the drive home, and doodle here on Substack.

That is pure joy.

Some days, I cry into my coffee cup because I don’t know how long I can get away with this financially. The solitude can feel heavy, and I don’t know if I will ever launch the thing I am here to do or find out what exactly that even looks like. I have an idea, but the plane is being built as I …take off? Feels like I am still on the tarmac.

I dance between the crests and troughs of it all.

I have been in this space since I left the corporate world, the “real world,” and joined Peter Pan in Never Never Land. I can hear my therapist now:

“Jocelyn, whose voice is that?”

“My ex-husband’s.”

“OK, tune it out.”

The pay was horrible. The commute was worse. The hours were insane for academia—I was also in charge of guiding the journalism student staff in producing a weekly newspaper, which was no small feat. Production hours were student hours, which meant 10 p.m. on both Friday and Monday to get the paper to the printer by Tuesday and ready for distribution on five campuses throughout the district by Wednesday morning.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic sent us home for 1.5 years. While much of the world was in disarray, I was emerging from that asbestos-infected, windowless building 25 miles from my beautiful son, historic, tree-lined, walkable neighborhood and two dogs. I got to taste freedom — working hours that allowed me to be a single mother, practice yoga in my living room, and take long afternoon walks with the sun in my face — while still earning a living and getting all of my work done. I had time to cook dinners, go to therapy, jog at dawn, and even get back into the saddle again. For real. I started taking lessons again once a week on a beautiful Arabian horse farm.

I started to look different — I lost 15 lbs without trying, got color back in my face, and started getting confused for being my son’s older sister. For the first time in years, I had time to be with friends and date. Before, I had given up on even thinking I could have any connection in any capacity. The flexibility that the pandemic introduced told me that another life was possible.

This wasn’t the only way. They want you to believe that so you will play small and build their dream for the price of your soul.

My soul wilted when the college called us all back into the office with no adaptations or flexibility. I had a choice to make: Would I go back? Could I survive going back to a life with so little connection? Would I survive leaving the “stability”?

A leap like this would mean jumping into a dark abyss of the unknown, but I would be jumping into a life not merely half-lived. I would be jumping into the vastness of me.

My divorce decree stated I needed to stay in the town I was in or risk losing my son, who was 8 years old at the time. So looking for work would be restricted to the area I live in, unless I found something remote. I live in the southern part of the U.S. where we are all a little behind the times. Remote work still isn’t really a common thing here. And journalism was an impossible job to find full-time work anywhere in the country, so I was told I should feel lucky to even have landed the job I have, and with “benefits”!

By the way, the quotation marks are because the concept of benefits is so funny to me — they are the things that we should have rights to as a human. Healthcare? Vacation time? Sick days? Who gave an institution the right to dish those out to me? Shouldn’t that be my right by virtue of being alive?

To leave that job would be to walk into the unknown, alone.

I made it until mid-October 2021 when my boss said I had to attend a virtual student media conference from the office, with my mask on and the door closed for three days (the Delta variant was sweeping across the world at that point).

“I have to endure a commute in rush hour traffic, pay babysitters and dogsitters to be at my house so I could isolate IN MY OFFICE? For three days?”

“Jocelyn, your needs as a single mother shouldn’t trump the students' needs.”

“The two aren’t mutually exclusive, [asshole,]” I said as I stormed out of his office. Brackets for the part I wish I had said. He felt it, though.

I filed a complaint for all the condescending and demoralizing ways this man managed me for years and submitted my resignation letter 24 hours later. The complaint went to the dean, his best friend; hence, it went nowhere. The pain of these injustices made my choice easy—abyss.

I left that campus for good at the end of the semester in mid-December 2021, and it felt like what I imagined leaving jail would be like. It. Felt. So. Good. I had no idea how confined I felt before until that crisp, blue-sky sunny December day.

I worked part-time as the editorial director of a meaningful and beautiful start-up magazine that supported women, but it didn’t make it for long — the woman who owned it didn’t have a solid business plan and couldn’t keep it going. She also couldn’t afford to pay me much.

I applied to what felt like a hundred jobs. Didn’t hear a thing back. Then I heard the whisper: What if you are meant to be still for a little while? To get quiet and get to know who you are? No titles. To begin a lifetime of healing. To begin to live your life, travel, maybe even date and fall in love, to start writing again. To become.

“To become what?”

“You.”

“But I am me.”

“No, the true you left yourself long ago to participate in the lie that you had to deny your joy and be someone else to make it in this world.”

“There is another way?”

“Yes, my love. You get to live a life of ease, of joy, of communion and connection, of love, and create work that brings you joy.”

“I do?”

“Yes, you do. But first, you have to come home to yourself, and that could take some time. The woman you dream of becoming already exists. You are not just on the journey to become—you are on the journey to remember her. It is an unfolding of what is already within you, not stepping into someone outside of you. You have been coming home.”

The same is true for you, reader. Your magic, your power, your radiance—it has always been with you. It has always flowed through you, as natural as breath, as steady as the pulse of the earth beneath your feet. But until we create a life that allows space for our souls to breathe, we become like a flower with no sun or water. Busyness and external validation are like straitjackets to our souls.

Your full brilliance, your queendom, is revealed in layers, in seasons, but not without the fertile void the liminal space offers. There is a point to all of this. I promise. It can be brutal at times, but you are not alone and your life is not pointless.

This remembering takes time not because you are unworthy of it now, but because you are being prepared to hold the unlimited potential and power that you can as a being fully divine and fully human.

Then I had this epiphany out walking my dogs last night, just after I started writing this. I am already her, the woman I have always dreamed I could be. Bear with me as this may not make sense outside of my head, and this would be an attempt to transcribe the inexplicable truth I tripped over: If little me was not lesser than who I am now, then future me is not more than I am now, then who I am in this liminal space is all of me. Our true selves exist outside of space and time in the eternal now. I have access to the woman I hope to be NOW. The ability to be present in your life, away from all the noise, is to reach out through the cosmos and melt into the part of you that is eternal.

More whispers.

Jocelyn, you are at a crossroads. You have a choice to make. Are you going to stay safe and small or choose to step into your fullest potential?

OK, this is frustrating because I have walked away from so much, choosing me, choosing my son, seeking softness and joy. What else could I do? What am I not doing?

It is not about doing more to become her, it is about embodying her, stepping into a room and knowing you are allowed to take up space, to let your light fill every corner of a banquet hall and fill up your plate with all things good, knowing that you belong in the life you dream of. It is saying affirmations and believing them. It is practicing gratitude for the ways you already are that woman, looking at all you have achieved thus far. What kind of woman has the courage to exist in the liminal spaces? A powerful and beautiful soul.

I am still in this space hovering between worlds, and it is not easy, but it has been the most potent time of my life. Like a fast course of healing, growth, learning, loving, losing. Once I created the space to become, my soul rushed back into my body, and I came back to life. I got the life back that is my human right. I am free.

“Rediscover the abounding worlds that live inside of you. Bring that expansiveness home. Buck ingrained habits of identifying with old stories, resentments and injustices […] Be willing to disrupt your routine,” another card I pulled from that same deck the same morning. This was the Horse: Freedom card.

Freedom = acceptance and surrender.

Life = process of discovery.

Joy is in the process, in the living. I get so focused on arriving that I forget to enjoy the ride on the way, because the ride there is the meat between the two slices of bread, the cream cheese on the bagel. The process of becoming is where all the miracles take place. It is when the caterpillar's body literally dissolves into a cosmic ooze. Painful, yes, but miraculous.

It may seem as though nothing is happening, but in truth, everything is shifting within you. This is the sacred quiet before the rising. You are being prepared—not for a small life, but for one filled with light, truth and deep purpose.

It is not emptiness—it is creation. It is not stagnation—it is refinement.

A dear friend reached out as I was writing this. She is also in this in-between and suffering greatly. It is not easy. Let me say that again. It is NOT easy. Someone had reached out to her about being a guest on their podcast for being a woman known to inspire and empower other women. She passed.

“A few years ago I would have been that woman, but today I’m not.” So she sent the woman my information. This is what I had to say back:

“You ARE that woman! You know how brave it is to do what you are doing? To walk away from everything that society uses to define our worth? To sit in the quiet liminal space empty-handed and stare into the void listening for what’s next? That is so hard and takes infinite courage! Thank you for sending my contact to her, but I do believe you are the most impactful woman I know.”

“I don’t know what to say. Your words bring me to actual tears. I don’t feel like that woman. I feel like an absolute loser who doesn’t deserve to breathe air. I feel so lost and full of shame that I’m unworthy.”

“You are the most worthy and beautiful woman I know because you choose your sanity over the bullshit corporate dream each and every day. I mean this from the bottom of my heart and I know this is true.”

We jumped on a call and commiserated about how hard it is to live an authentic life. I shared with her that I did not have anything figured out, and I struggle most days. I was struggling big time that day, so I bought myself a giant cookie, some really expensive crackers, a chicken pot pie and a stupid expensive sweater.

This conversation gave me pause and purpose to finish this writing.

It also reminded me that we are all outgrowing this world. Some of us faster than others, but it isn’t a race. It’s just that those of us to arrive there first will help lead the others to their freedom.

It’s like the old clothes and shoes are too tight, but we haven’t yet received our new garments. Growing pains settle in as our bones ache from all the changes. Discomfort is the in-between.

“Life begins at the end of your comfort zone,” reads a quote by Neale Donald Walsch on a foreboding magnet that has been on my fridge for ten years.

But I trust that this is all leading to something more glorious, more beautiful and more powerful than anything younger me could have imagined and anything the old world could even hold.

You are outgrowing this world’s limits, its conditioning, its smallness. The old world was about forcing, doing, making things happen. This new itchy liminal space is about allowing and receiving.

Your presence in this space is enough. Even when you feel empty-handed, even when you have no grand title, no certainty, no ‘next step’—you are still a beautiful and whole human radiating light. Do not underestimate your worth.

Please keep walking toward your freedom. This is not a “one-and-done” situation. It is a daily choice. A breath-by-breath returning to yourself. Even in all my discomfort, I would rather live this way than any other way. It is the most authentic I have ever been, which allows me to show up for my son, my future partner, the world, and most importantly, myself, in the most beautiful ways.

Yes, this path is uncomfortable at times. Yes, it can feel lonely. But you are alive in your truth, and that is worth more than all the false comforts the world once offered you. Excitement and fear are two sides of the same energy. Do not mistake fear for a stop sign; it is a signal that you are stepping beyond old limits and stretching into new territory. Let it fuel you, not freeze you.

I wish to borrow some words of wisdom from my favorite recovery writer, Melody Beattie:

“We may have many feelings going on when we’re in-between: spurts of grief about what we have let go of or lost, and feelings of anxiety, fear and apprehension about what’s ahead. These are normal feelings for the in-between place. Accept them. Feel them. Release them. Being in-between isn’t fun, but it’s necessary. It will not last forever. It may feel like we’re standing still, but we’re not. We’re standing at the in-between place. It’s how we get from here to there. It is not the destination. We are moving forward, even when we’re in-between.”

I’ve read this a hundred times since that day I walked into the unknown toward myself.

This place is not without purpose. It is leading to something far better than we could ever imagine. This time will create new spaces in your heart, and from those spaces, you will create the powerful thing you will do next. This I know with all my heart, the heart I can finally hear. This time and this conflict is not for nothing.

This isn’t a period of waiting, this is a time to live. Life isn’t on hold unless you put it on hold. We are preparing. But we prepare by living, bumping into people, practicing the joy that is coming, the joy that is our divine birthright. What does it look like to be present in the in-between? This is a call to pause and acknowledge the fruit in the liminal spaces rather than rushing past them because the ringing in our ears is annoying.

Skin is raw, for the old skin is peeled back, and new skin grows thicker over our bones. It’s no accident that in Chinese culture, 2025 is the Year of the Snake.

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