liminality
Big evolution means big grief.
I am shedding myself in layers
Molting away
Do snakes feel pain when they lose dead parts of themselves?
It’s not necessarily pain I feel
It’s the moment after- having eagerly wriggled out fresh into the world that I miss my old skin
I knew what it felt like, how it contained me
I was predictable
Now?
I am fresh into this world
I am new
Chaotic
Unbound
There is a lot to grieve
There is a lot of learning how to grieve.
In addition to the role of artist I am also a life coach and in my work I witness grief almost daily. It shows up everywhere in the big and small shifts of life. Grief is subtle. In our society, we often struggle with how to honor our grief. We want this process to be clean and tidy, orderly and organized but the truth is this process is messy and fumbling. This process can shake you to your core. This process shakes me to my core.
I made this collection more than a year ago and as I’m looking back, I don’t think it’s dramatic to say that this season was a complete re-orientation, a complete transformation of my life. I was learning how to be on my own. I was learning about who I was as the core of me, without the validation of family or partners or work. And I think in a lot of ways, I was learning how to unmask. This summer, almost a year after I created this collection, I learned that I'm autistic. I look back and can't help but think that there was a really wise part of me. This part of me- insistent, creeping up, inevitable. Saying to me, listen sweetheart, I'm coming. It's almost time. You'll never be the same again and that's the point. That's the whole point.
I remember writing about a snake shedding its skin, always learning how to grieve, always needing to learn how to grieve and feeling really exhausted by that prospect and that truth, that grief in some way will always be with me. I will always be changing and learning, and therefore grieving the pieces of me left in the past. And while this is exhausting, it’s also so beautiful. Energy wants to move. No feeling wants to stay forever. It wants to be seen, felt, heard and then move on. Creating this collection helped me listen to the tender parts of myself that were lonely and unsure. It pointed me back to myself. I hope tonight you can experience that for yourself as well. Some direction inward. We are each our own safest place to land.
An anthropological term, liminality is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete. We experience many rites of passage- youth to adulthood, babies being born, committing to a partner, etc. During a rite's liminal stage, participants "stand at the threshold" between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way.
To me, liminality signifies transition. It is the space in between. It's the messy middle where you are no longer the former and not yet the latter, a forced holding pattern. It’s a time for simplicity, a time for holding onto the things that you know and are sure of. Liminality is a time of all questions and very few answers. Unanchored, unmoored, out to sea. It is devastating and it’s necessary. There are hard edges, but all are rounded. There is no hand-hold.. Nothing sticks in this season. Nothing is meant to.
As I wrote this, there was a clock on the wall that's second-counting hand didn’t quite have enough oomf to get past the 30 minute mark. It's just like that. Knowing that time is moving. It's got to be moving right? And somehow it's not. Life is outpacing you.
In order to transform from the here to the there, the truth is, part of the former has to die. Part of us has to die. Liminal spaces invite us into deeper, more beautiful, more true relationship with ourselves. Liminality is neither birth nor death, it is the contraction. It is the pulse. The way out, the exit and the way in. It’s the wave of disorientation, sometimes pain, sometimes confusion as we oscillate between saying goodbye to what we’ve known and learning about what is ahead
