Guides for the liminal spaces: On queerness, neurodivergence, and the boxes that don’t fit us anymore

Listen to Heather read the post:

There’s a place I love to walk. I discovered it at the beginning of the summer, when my daughters and I rented a little house in a different neighbourhood of the city than where we’d lived before. It’s a low-lying area along the Red River, ending where it meets the Seine River. It’s an area that’s frequently flooded in Spring when the rivers swell their banks. You can see the marks of past floods on the trunks of the trees that are rooted there.

I love this place because it feels liminal – a space between two realities. Sometimes it is solid land, sometimes it is part of the river, and sometimes it is covered in thick, gooey mud after the water has subsided. It’s special (and somewhat mystical) partly because I can only navigate it when Mother Nature gives me permission. Whenever it is wet, I have to walk a different path on higher ground.

I have a greater propensity for liminality than most people. I go seeking it in nature and in life because I want to understand it, to know it as deeply as I can even though its very nature is to remain always somewhat unknowable. There’s a mystery that draws me to it, and so I make choices that seem baffling to many because a strange siren call beckons me toward this mystical place. 

In anthropology, liminality is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage. It’s a space of transition, threshold, ritual, and quest. In most of the literature about it, liminality is a temporary place that has an end-point – a place we eventually emerge out of when our new story begins. It’s what happens when we lose our job, a loved one dies, or we move through puberty into adulthood.

According to Victor Turner, one of the pre-eminent early writers on the subject, liminality can have three dimensions – a moment, a period, or an epoch. Momentary liminal spaces are sudden events, like death, divorce, or illness. Periodic liminal spaces are stages of life, like puberty or the shift into elderhood. Epochal liminal spaces are those that last a lifetime, like when someone steps out of or is exiled from society (monkhood, for example). (Source: The Uses and Meaning of Liminality)

At least in Turner’s early work, there is some apparent judgement of epochal liminality. He talks of “stuckness”, “failed ritual” and “danger”. These qualifying words seem to miss out on the beauty of what is offered from this place of suspended liminality. What about those of us who feel called to lives of liminality? Those of us who live as edgewalkers and wanderers, always witnessing society but never being fully part of it? What about the value of the lessons we learn there? What of the gifts we offer to those who don’t spend their lives in quest as we do?

I don’t know why liminality is so deeply embedded in who I am. I don’t know why I seek it out in such an intentional way that I sold my home last year (as soon as my daughters moved away) and have been nomadic ever since. Perhaps if I were more connected to my own ancient indigeneity, if it hadn’t been so intentionally trained out of me by colonization, religion, and patriarchy, I would have a better understanding of the purpose and calling in this restlessness. Perhaps I would see myself (and the society I live in would see it too) as some kind of medicine woman, explorer, alchemist, or guide. Perhaps there would have even been a ritual way of commissioning me into it – a robe placed across my shoulders, perhaps, and a walking stick offered for the journey.

What I DO know, after years of doubting my purpose, years of wondering why I didn’t fully know what it meant to fit in, and years of judging my restlessness, is that there is value in this calling. It may not be fully understood, in a culture that centres capitalism, colonization and consumerism and distances itself from spirituality and indigeneity, but it is necessary. Perhaps now more than ever, it is of value.

Now, when the world feels increasingly wobbly and the systems we’ve created that used to make us feel secure only add to the wobbliness, we need guides for the liminal spaces. We need people who have the resilience, resources, and capacity to skillfully navigate what is unknown and unknowable, people who understand the quest and aren’t afraid to lead other people through it. We need people with courage and strength to face the uncertainty.

Several years ago, around the time I was leaving my full-time employment to set off on this quest called self-employment, I heard a speaker at a conference say, “The world needs more people who know how to navigate in the dark.” In that instant, the whole world went still and everyone else in the room disappeared. I knew she was talking directly to me. I was very much “in the dark” at that moment, having quit my job just after my then-husband attempted suicide. As much as I felt lost and overwhelmed at that time, though, I had a strong sense that there was something in me that was being strengthened by the darkness for a higher purpose. I’d felt it years earlier, too, when my stillborn son Matthew was born and I felt oddly at peace and empowered as I navigated the darkness and grief of that time.

Perhaps that moment, when the whole room went still and I heard the words of the speaker as a clarion call, was my modern-day version of a commissioning into this work. Perhaps that was my invitation to stop doubting myself and step fully into the confidence that this work was calling me. Not long afterward, I started the work that would eventually lead to my first book and the Centre for Holding Space. I have been faithful to the calling ever since.

Lately I’ve had some new thoughts about liminality and about the value and purpose of this space. It occurs to me that liminality is not just the space in between “what was” and “what will be”, but it’s the space between polarities. It’s the space between black and white, good and bad – even male and female. It’s the space of “transition”, “transcendence” and “transness”. It’s the curved line on the yin-yang symbol

In liminality, old boxes, definitions, polarities, beliefs, and dogmas fall apart. That can feel like a scary and destabilizing place to be. We can’t make sense of this new space from within the limitation of our old version of sense-making. We try but we always fail. Often, we try to put the genie back in the bottle but the genie refuses. The genie is a lover of freedom.

I believe this is part of the reason why the rights of trans people have become such a focal point recently (at least here, in North America). Trans people represent liminality – the space in between male and female – and many people want to put “the genie back in the bottle”. For those people, the world makes more sense, and it feels safer if gender exists only on a binary. 

Many people bemoan the fact that more and more people are coming out as trans and that there is greater and greater demand for gender-affirming care. These people have constructed a belief that there is a “gay agenda”, that drag queens are grooming young children into gay lifestyles, and that providing more supportive spaces in schools for trans youth is a threat to family rights. I hear the fear of liminality in these people – they want to return to what they believe was a world that made sense and where they could keep their children safe.

I have a very different view of this issue. I feel hopeful that more and more people are seeing themselves for who they truly are, outside of the definitions and binaries that once boxed them in (and that we, as a culture, were addicted to). I am encouraged by those who find themselves in “epochal liminality”, outside of the limitations of linear, binary thinking. Just as I resisted the language of “stuckness”, “failed ritual” and “danger” in the anthropological literature, I am much more inclined to see the beauty and value of what is transpiring and to challenge the resistance.

This form of liminality is not without precedent among non-human animal species. In an episode of the podcast, You’re Wrong About, there’s a fascinating exploration of queer animals, including an island with an unusually high percentage of lesbian seagulls. According to the research done by the podcast host, our awareness of how much queerness shows up in animals is limited largely because there is fear and lack of funding that limits the research.

I am hopeful that that is changing and that, despite the political push to “put the genie back in the bottle”, there is increasing openness to the liminality of queerness. I am delighted to be witness, for example, to the ways that my daughters and their circles of friends explore gender and sexuality. There’s a playfulness there, an openness to possibility. They inspire me to explore it for myself as well, to step into liminality with them. I don’t feel any of the fear that I might have in my younger, more religious days (or that I witness in some of my friends).

I believe that trans people, and all others across the 2SLGBTQIA+ spectrum, have a gift to offer the world from their place of liminality. I believe that many have gained wisdom from their own personal quests that the rest of us can benefit from. By removing themselves from the boxes that once confined them, they are modeling what it can look like to no longer be confined by the systems we’ve created and that now harm us. I believe that instead of resisting and marginalizing them, we should be listening and paying attention.

I feel similarly about the number of us who are now identifying as neurodivergent. There is freedom in exploring what it means to remove ourselves from what is seen as “normal”. There is gift and possibility when we step out of the frame ourselves, or when we listen to those who do.

Bayo Akomolafe once said, in a conversation in which he talked about the neurodivergence of his son, that “whiteness attempts to flatten everything” and I hear the truth of that. Systems of dominance, like white supremacy, colonization, and patriarchy, attempt to flatten us, to put us all in boxes and to keep us there. Those of us who live in the liminal spaces are forced to reside in spaces that feel more safe for the dominant culture. We lose our uniqueness, we lose the ceremonies that celebrate and empower us to step into our special areas of giftedness, and we are forcibly distanced from our own internal sources of wisdom.

When we break out of those boxes and see ourselves outside of the lenses of those systems, when we enter the liminality of a world that’s less definable, we bring dimension and possibility back to a flattened world. Instead of marginalizing those people who live in liminality, we should be embracing them, calling on their wisdom and gathering around them in the public square.

I want to say to those people who find themselves embracing their own liminality (whether that is in their queerness, their neurodivergence, or some other way), in much the same way as I heard from that speaker several years ago, that “the world needs more people who know how to navigate liminality”.

The world needs YOU, my friend, even if you’re currently feeling lost and overwhelmed and wounded by frightened people. The world needs you to continue to be true to yourself despite the efforts to put you back in a box (or a closet). The world needs you to be courageous and strong even when there are those who fear for your safety.

The world is changing and we need new skills for this changing world. One of those skills is the ability to navigate liminal spaces. Who better to guide us than those who are, by their very nature, liminal?

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Strengthen your capacity for liminal spaces in our online program, How to Hold Space Foundation Program

On being more human(e)

(photo credit: Danielle MacInnes, Unsplash)

I love slow mornings. Though I usually wake fairly early (on my own body-clock, not with an alarm), I take my time getting out of bed, sometimes reaching for my journal or a book first. Once I’m finally out from under the covers, I go from there to the bathtub where I also take my time (with a bath that sometimes includes Epsom salts). Eventually I end up in the kitchen, where I boil water for my tea and then have a late breakfast of yoghurt, fruit, and granola. Only after all of that do I open emails and my calendar and start to figure out what the day will require of me. 

This is one of the many perks of working from home and owning my own business, where I get to decide when/if I start my workday. 

I used to have lots of stories about how this makes me a lazy person and how I should be more disciplined and productive and how those people with strict morning routines (especially those that include rigorous workouts) are probably better people, but then I realized that those are stories I don’t need to carry anymore. They’re stories that I’ve been taught to carry by a capitalist system with an industrial mindset that elevates the value of grind culture and being obedient and “disciplined” workers. I don’t want that to be part of my life or the culture of my business, so I get to make my own rules. I’m always going to choose the “rules” that honour my humanity, my needs, and my own internal rhythms. (I put disciplined in quotation marks, because there are lots of other ways to bring discipline to your work without being attached to an arbitrary time clock.)

The further I get from a traditional workplace (it’s been ten years now), the more attuned I’ve become to my own natural rhythms and ways of working. As a writer/thinker/creator, I need lots of quiet time to process ideas and get lost in contemplation. I need slow mornings and long walks and/or bike rides to let my mind wrap itself around new ideas. Sometimes I need to check out of social media for awhile and be in conversation only with the voices in my own head (or with the squirrel currently perched on the branch outside my window). That’s not “wasted” time the way my socially conditioned inner critic sometimes tries to convince me it is. It’s actually very productive time, because it’s where my ideas are generated and played with before they end up on the page or in a workshop.

Because I intentionally carve out these times for myself, and I spend lots of time playing with ideas before sharing them with my readers or students, I also have rather remarkable capacity for high-intensity production when the ideas land in their more fully formed shape. That’s when it’s time to engage another of my favourite practices… I go away for a week, to a cabin or a place loaned to me by a friend, and I create a surprising volume of content – often working for twelve-hour days. That’s how I’ve written my book and created most of my courses – in short, intense, and focused bursts (that follow long, slow, meandering times of contemplation).

I have learned that these ways of functioning likely mean that I am on the spectrum for ADHD. As some have said, “attention deficit” is probably a misnomer and it should instead be called “attention dysregulation” – because people with ADHD might have a deficit of attention at times, when they’re doing things they don’t love to do, but then they become hyper-focused when they’re doing something that they love to do (as when I’m alone with my ideas in a cabin in the woods, or I’m building something with wood).

I feel privileged in that I have the opportunity to craft a life that works well with my own internal rhythm and the way my brain works. It not only serves me well, but it allows me to serve other people well. I have more capacity to hold space for other people because I am well-resourced and in a rhythm that fits me. And I have the capacity to adjust the rhythm of my days so that I can do things like meet my family’s needs and spend time with friends during times when they are available.

Many others are forced to live with rhythms, rules, and structures that don’t fit them nearly as well. Sometimes, in fact, there’s a certain violence to the way we try to force humans to fit into mechanized structures – especially when those humans are neurodivergent or disabled or otherwise disadvantaged by those structures. Our systems lose their humanity and begin to assume that we are all machines that need to function in a prescribed way in order to keep the system functioning well. And when we don’t function that way, the system creates narratives that shame us into thinking we are deficient and have less value because of it.

I wonder what it would look like to build systems and workplaces that do a better job of honouring human rhythms, capacity and needs. I wonder what we’d need to change in order to value people as they ARE rather than as we EXPECT them to be. I realize that in certain industries it might not work, but far too many workplaces still function as though every workplace is a factory that produce widgets rather than a place focused on serving the needs of real and complex humans.

As Krista and I build the Centre for Holding Space, we are doing our best to keep humanity at the centre of our organization and to disrupt any of the old patterns that have been normalized by capitalism but that might not serve us well. Sometimes we have to dig deeply and do some uncomfortable work to uncover our own social conditioning about the “right” ways to do things, and sometimes it’s easier to just accept “the way things have always been done”. But we know that change doesn’t come without some measure of disruption, and so we’re doing our best to walk our talk.

I encourage you to consider how your life might have been unknowingly structured by systems that don’t put your humanity at the centre. Perhaps you’ve bought into a lifestyle that doesn’t match your rhythm or capacity? Maybe you’re inadvertently doing violence to yourself because of the social conditioning that’s taught you to assume there is no other way?

I believe that this is one of the gifts of this pandemic. It has allowed us to re-imagine workplaces and expectations around how and when people will work. If we pay attention, and open ourselves to change, perhaps we’ll find ourselves moving into more human-centred environments.

Even if you’re not in a position to change how, when, and where you work, perhaps there are changes you can make to your life to honour yourself more? Maybe it’s a simple matter of accepting that you have a different rhythm than other people and that doesn’t make you wrong? Maybe you need to wake up later (or earlier), move more (or less), slow down (or speed up), spend more (or less) time alone, be in nature more, and/or find new ways to engage your creative energy?

It’s your life – how do you want to live it?

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p.s. If you’re part of a workplace that wants to be more human(e), perhaps we can help you? Check out our Holding Space for Organizations page, and be sure to watch our free video series, Love Letters for Those Who Hold Space.

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