Liminal Space -- Guest Blog Post by Nicole McGrath
Recently I heard about liminal space for the first time and it promptly became my new favourite thing, supplanting courgette cake, the happy result of too much COVID gardening and a glut of the strange vegetable. I have gone down the rabbit hole in search of just what liminal space is and how I can find it, where I can find it, how I can know it when I find it and what is possible there, indeed what could possibly be there in that space.
Whilst liminal space was new to me, I have known about the gloaming since I was child voraciously devouring fairy tales. Something about what the word conjures has always spoken to me on a visceral level. The gloaming is the space after sunset but before dark, twilight, if you will. For me, it goes without saying that this is a spiritual, sacred time of day, the transition of day into night, the ending of one thing and the beginning of something else, a soft closing out of the clamour of the day into something else, something cloaked in mystery and promise. The gloaming is liminal space.
As an adoptee, I feel that liminal space is the very place where I exist. The gloaming between the life that I was born to and the life I have now, neither the baby my first mother kept nor the child my parents wished for. I live in a place where I am neither one nor the other but something in between.
This is depressing and even heart breaking if we compare liminal space to a physical place; an airport terminal or a hotel hallway. Both feel buoyantly transitory during the day when people use these spaces as a concourse to get from one part of their life and place to another; busy, hectic even and totally normal. But at night when empty, they are eerie places where you feel out of sorts if you linger too long. Something feels not quite right about being in a transitory place or a ‘non-place’ if it’s purpose, that of transporting you elsewhere, has ceased to function. For me, this draws an uncanny parallel with my life; surrounded by people, performing and functioning during the day but in the quietness, when everyone is gone and I am alone, the feeling of being ‘not quite right’ and the difficulty staying with myself in this space.
And yet, to exist in a liminal place could be an adoptees greatest blessing. To be in this space means we are fluid, not fixed and we have the option to move forward, through this space to something else, something better. We can leave the empty airport of an evening and get on the last flight out to a new destination. We can walk the length of the empty hotel hallway and enter our room at the end to find a warm bath and a comfortable bed.
The liminal space is a paradox for us and we must be able to hold both elements - one in each hand. In one, our fear of true human connection keeps us in the space, always walking the empty hallways, never knocking on anyone’s door lest we disturb them, wake them from their sleep and inconvenience them by asking them to truly see us as we are. In the other hand, the joy of existing in this space that we are born into, that enables us to traverse it more competently than others, to be able to continually move forward in search of our greater truth, our true selves and to thrive in this space, searching for the right door, that will open before us and take us to the next place.
