On Being a Liminal Human

By Chyonne Kreltszheim

(Facilitator, Coach and Recovering Lawyer)

Not to be dramatic or anything, but I felt like I was dying.

At age 39, I was healthy enough — physically. At that stage, I wasn’t even feeling particularly depressed. But something wasn’t right.

I’d lost my motivation — that much was clear. Was it burnout? Probably, at least in part. But around the edges of my exhaustion, there was also a creeping sense of dread — like something was ending.

Twelve months prior, I had resigned from my dream job. It was the first time in my career that I didn’t have a new job waiting for me, despite being inculcated in the value of job security by my Sri Lankan parents. The prospect of talking to recruiters and going for interviews at that stage… I just couldn’t.

I’d had my dream job, before it all fell apart. Where do you go from there?

I gave myself six months to figure out what I wanted to do next. I hired a coach, and threw myself into a course on Ontological Coaching. When some contracting opportunities came along out of the blue, I thought: “I can probably do this for another six months.”

But 12 months on, I didn’t have any answers — only more questions.

What’s wrong with me? Why do I feel so demotivated? Is this the end of my career? Did I peak too early? Will people think I’m a failure?

(Actually, it was the end of my career — just not in the way I thought.)

My disquiet intensified in the months leading up to my 40th birthday. My father was turning 70, so we decided to celebrate with a joint birthday party.

Driving to my parents’ house on the day of the party, a thought hit me like a tsunami: What if this is the last time we’ll celebrate together as a family? I fought back the tears as I pulled up to the kerb. I couldn’t lose it today, in front of all these people. Get a grip.

My mind doubled-down on the thought that something bad was about to happen. It was time to brace myself for the worst…

But nothing happened.

The party came and went. And I spun my wheels for another six months.

I slept in whenever I could. I spent hours a day on YouTube. I avoided my friends with their well-meaning advice. And yet I couldn’t bring myself to do the things that might help me to restart my career. I knew that I was supposed to be ‘networking’ (ugh), but every coffee catch-up reminded me that I had nothing to say that was worth saying.

The soundtrack to my life was ‘Losing My Ambition’ (with apologies to R.E.M.).

I was psychologically stateless.

Some weeks later, I was perched on a chair in an Ontological Coaching workshop, legs twisted like a pretzel as they often are when I’m immersed in something. Alan Sieler, our teacher, had just started talking about the ‘space of nothingness’, which he described as an integral part of the process of learning and becoming. A space characterised by feelings of anxiety, fear, uncertainty, and confusion.

A space in which we’re not who we used to be, but we’re not yet who we could become.

Um, hello — that’s me!

I untwisted my legs and sat up straight. I wanted to cry out in relief, but I was too busy taking notes. Every word was breathing life back into my soul.

My jaw unclenched, and I released a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding.

I was living every word of what Alan was describing. And to hear that it was a ‘thing’ — that it wasn’t just me — well, maybe I wasn’t broken, maybe I hadn’t failed, maybe there was a glimmer of hope on the horizon.

For the first time in years, I had something to stand on.

The word ‘nothingness’ threw me at first. I wasn’t feeling nothing — I was feeling everything. But then I recalled a Zen Buddhist concept I’d heard about — the concept of ‘no-thingness’. This made more sense to me — I was no longer the thing I thought I was. Chyonne 2.0 was gone but Chyonne 3.0 hadn’t arrived yet.

And that sense that things were ending? As my coach put it, “It’s like you’re hanging onto your old self with your fingernails.”

It was time to let go.

So then I did what I always do — I leapt down the rabbit hole.

Over the next several months, I discovered that the space of nothingness was the ontological terminology for a phenomenon that was the subject of several diverse bodies of knowledge. I read everything I could get my hands on — spiritual, mythological, psychological, organisational, sociological, even astrological. I was desperate to understand the invisible architecture of the experience I was living.

I soon noticed a term that kept coming up in my reading: the ‘liminal space’.

This term was developed and popularised by cultural anthropologist Victor Turner based on the work of ethnographer and folklorist Arnold Van Gennep. Both Turner and Van Gennep studied the ways in which different cultures used rituals to navigate the threshold between states, including birth, puberty, marriage, and death. In Latin, the word for threshold is ‘limen’, hence the term ‘liminal space’.

Turner described the liminal space as one that is ‘betwixt and between’ — ‘necessarily ambiguous’, because it is ‘neither here nor there’. It sounded a lot like the space of no-thingness to me — a waiting room of sorts between what was and what’s next.

It turns out that liminal spaces are a normal and necessary part of change. They enable us to let go of who we were and recreate ourselves (in particular, our identity) into who we are becoming. Any when I realised that I was in a liminal space, it gave me the opportunity to navigate it consciously — and creatively.

Endings are always new beginnings in waiting.

Nearly 10 years and several rabbit holes later, I found myself thinking about liminal spaces earlier this year when I was agonising over the state of the world. It reminded me of the feeling I’d experienced on the day of that joint birthday party — the feeling that something was dying. I paused my doomscrolling for long enough to recall how the concept of liminality had helped me to reframe the disorientation of that period and turn it into an opportunity for making some fundamental changes to my way of seeing and being in the world. And it occurred to me that it might be helpful for understanding the challenges we are experiencing collectively today.

Liminality gives me a sense of hope. It soothes my angst to know that what we’re facing is not as ‘unprecedented’ as we tend to believe — not if you can see the invisible architecture that underpins it all. And it inspires me to imagine that there is something we can all contribute to shaping the thing that will be — that is being — born from this period of disruption and despair.

And this leads me to some new questions:

What if the world isn’t falling apart? What if it is falling together?

What if this is a necessary stage in the transformation of our society? Our organisations? Ourselves? And, if so, how can we exercise our leadership to navigate this liminal space more effectively?

And on a more personal note:

How do we retain our humanity in a world that is rapidly changing?

We are in a liminal space — a great transition; a period of rapid evolution. And we can influence that evolution by evolving in ourselves.

I don’t have all the answers — no one does. But I am deeply curious to find out where this rabbit hole goes. Care to join me?

Liminal Human is a project by Chyonne Kreltszheim that helps people to navigate the space between what was and what’s next. Subscribe for free on Substack to have new posts delivered straight to your inbox. https://liminalhuman.substack.com/