Betwixt & Between: The Hallways of Your Life Don't Have to Feel Haunted
Certain settings make perfect backdrops for horror to unfold in books and movies. Places like empty malls or amusement parks, overgrown dirt roads, or eerie hallways that seem to stretch on just a little too long. If you’ve ever been stuck between chapters or phases of your life, no longer the person you were, but not quite the person you’re becoming, you probably recognize that uncanny, slightly haunted feeling. It’s the feeling of being in a liminal space.
What Is a Liminal Space?
“Liminal” comes from the Latin “limen,” meaning threshold. It’s a word used to describe spaces, times, and states that exist at a point of change. An anthropologist named Arnold van Gennep used the term to describe the middle stage of a rite of passage, the period after you’ve left behind an old status but before you’ve entered a new one. Another anthropologist, Victor Turner, later described people in this stage as being “betwixt and between.“
As I’ve been working through the scaffolding of a possible framework to help people deal with fragmentation in their lives, I’ve started to picture the concept of identity as a house: an ever-changing, sometimes surreal cosmic structure with many rooms, each one representing a different part of who we are. Energy, awareness, autonomy, and attention move from room to room. And that movement can either be deliberate and orchestrated, almost like feng shui, or it can be chaotic and disjointed, with stairs leading to nowhere and doors opening up onto brick walls. Like the Winchester Mystery House!
I believe that learning to recognize and walk through three specific doorways—Self-Stewardship, Intention, and Discernment—helps us create coherence in our sense of self, to live and lead as whole and integrated individuals.
Every House Has Hallways
But every house has hallways. Sometimes we’re forced into them by something outside our control: an injury, the loss of a loved one, or a job that disappears overnight. Other times, we step into them deliberately. We might choose to leave a long-held career or walk away from a relationship. Either way, the experience tends to manifest the same thoughts: I don’t know what to do next. Or: I know what I have to do, but I’m not ready to do it.
Your brain relies on past experience to anticipate what comes next, and when it can’t, it tends to register this liminal space as a threat. Some research suggests that not knowing whether something bad will happen can be even more stressful than knowing for certain that it will. But the deeper fear is about our identity. The hallway challenges the parts of ourselves we’ve built our identities around, like our independence, competence, or toughness. The rooms we were in no longer feel the same, and the new ones are under construction. For a while, the house doesn’t feel like home at all.
You might feel an intense urge to pick a door, any door, and run toward it like an escape hatch. Why? Because even that false certainty feels better than the scariness of uncertainty. It’s the moment in every horror movie when someone panics, grabs the nearest handle, and yanks open the one door they shouldn’t. Surprise, surprise: it’s a dead end.
How the Doorways Distort in Liminal Space
Even the three doorways–Self-Stewardship, Intention, and Discernment—which I believe are ways to stay close to meaning and coherence, can become distorted in a hallway.
1. Self-Stewardship
At its best, Self-Stewardship is the practice of tending to your body and mind as collaborators, reading your body’s signals before they become emergencies, letting emotions move through you without judgment, and recovering so you have the capacity to respond instead of react. But the person who desperately wants to find relief in a liminal space will often run toward this door too soon, fitting it into a routine that suits the “old” them. It can distort into shallow, surface-level self-care as a way to avoid feeling anything at all.
2. Intention
Intention answers two deceptively simple questions: What do I want? And why? It’s an act of ongoing course correction, choosing where you want to go, again and again, and checking those choices against your default decisions and behaviors so they don’t make the choice for you. However, when in a liminal space, the planner in us tends to bolt toward Intention, drafting a detailed strategy before the dust has even settled. Again, the “old” you makes a commitment that the “new” you can’t agree to.
3. Discernment
Discernment asks: What’s actually true here? What deserves my attention? And what can I let go of? It’s like embodied perception, reading patterns instead of isolated moments, catching your own biases, and weighing what is at stake before acting. In a liminal space, if you’re someone who tends to over-analyze, you might leap through Discernment too soon, overthinking every possible option until you are completely paralyzed. Or you could end up making discernment calls based on other people’s needs instead of your own.
The Doorways as Lotus Fruit
In The Odyssey, Odysseus sends a few of his men ashore on the island of the Lotus-Eaters. The locals offer them the lotus fruit, and once they taste it, they forget about home entirely. They want nothing more than to stay and keep eating. Odysseus has to drag them back to the ships in tears and tie them down so they can’t return. Each of the three doorways can become its own kind of lotus. Numbness, a premature plan, or an endless loop of analysis: every option offers temporary relief, but they come at a cost. You might settle into an unfinished room, or find that every door just leads back to the hallway. Either way, you’ve abandoned the greater journey.
Stay Betwixt and Between
I know this pattern intimately. I almost always default by running toward Intention first. Where am I going? Why? And what’s the why beneath that? And beneath that? Those answers usually help me choose my next move. Then the part of my identity that prizes toughness will grab the wheel and keep driving long after the rest of me is begging for a break. When that happens, I drift away from my Self in small, almost invisible ways. But the hallway is the place where the questions of where, why, and how don’t have answers yet. The liminal space asks you to stay between possibilities and surrender to change.
Respond, Don’t React
So how do you keep from racing through a door, any door, just to escape? First, know that it’s OK to be here. Whether you were pushed or stepped into the hallway on your own accord, being here doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It means the house is changing, undergoing some kind of cosmic reconstruction. And staying may be one of the truest acts of leadership available to you. Being a leader, as I’ve come to understand it, is to stay present and make a choice in the face of what’s ending or beginning, to respond consciously rather than react on autopilot. Every one of us is asked to do this, whether we hold a title or not. Racing through a door is a reaction. But staying in the hallway long enough to feel, change, and eventually choose is a response.
Your Waiting Has a Purpose
While Odysseus is journeying home, his wife Penelope is back in Ithaca in her own liminal space. Her own hallway. With her husband gone so long, a crowd of suitors moves in, demanding she choose one of them. Her house no longer feels like hers. She agrees to decide only once she finishes weaving a burial shroud for her father-in-law. Then, every night, she unravels what she wove that day. She holds that line for years, refusing to be rushed through a door.
One of the greatest gifts you can give yourself is the patience to wait out the shift. To weave and, if necessary, unweave. For those of us who hate waiting, this is hard. It means accepting that we can’t force things to work out on our schedule, or in precisely the way we want. But Penelope’s waiting had a purpose. And so does yours. The trick is to determine the difference between waiting with purpose and using “the timing isn’t right” as a way to avoid a door you’re afraid to open. That requires knowing your personal setpoint.
If your default is to rush, like mine is, you may release too briefly and re-engage too soon. One safeguard is to set a minimum amount of time before you let yourself decide. It also helps to name, in advance, the evidence that would tell you you’re ready. Maybe it’s the ability to sleep through the night again. That way, you’ll know readiness when you see it, instead of mistaking restlessness for it.
If your default is to stall, you may need to recognize when waiting has turned into hiding. Here, the timeline works the same but in the opposite direction. Name the signs or signals that would tell you it’s time to move, like returning to the same possibility over and over, or noticing that waiting is starting to feel less like evolution and more like decomposition. When those signs appear, the timing may be right.
When The Time is Right, There Is a Way Out
When you are ready, reflection and imagination are often the way out. Look at what has ended, as well as what you want your days to be like now. Let yourself consider more than one outcome, and wonder what your future Self, the one who has come out stronger on the other end of things, might tell you. It can also help to find someone who has stood in a hallway like yours and ask how they made it more comfortable and less terrifying.
Somewhere up ahead, more than one possibility is taking shape. The same doorways that tempted you as premature escape hatches—Self-Stewardship, Intention, and Discernment—will become real options once again, doors to choose instead of flee toward. In the meantime, the hallway doesn’t have to feel so haunted. Think of it instead as being “betwixt and between.” There’s more Alice in Wonderland in that, and less of The Shining. We aren’t meant to live in the hallway forever. It is a place to exist, for now. It is a place to become something new.
