Surviving the Swim
We talk about liminal space, the in-between, as full of possibility. Sometimes it is. It can also be disorienting, exposing, and bleak.
Here's the image I keep coming back to:
You're on an island. Not great, not terrible. It can sustain you. Then you see lights on the horizon. You've noticed them for a while now, if you're honest.
Land, maybe. Possibility.
You decide to swim for it. It feels brave at first. Then halfway across, you're tired, and both the island and the lights are far away.
Here's something that sometimes gets overlooked about that moment: it isn't just far from both shores. It's committed. You can't swim back to the island any more easily than you can reach the light. The water doesn't care which direction you started facing.
Once you're in the water, it's tempting to imagine swimming back. Sometimes people do. They go back to the job, the relationship, the country or the life they left. But the fantasy is rarely about returning to the place. It's about returning to the person you were before you left. The crossing has already changed you.
It was never about comfort.
We tend to talk about what you leave behind as a comfort zone, as if the island was just pleasant, and leaving it is a growth exercise. I don't think that's accurate, and I think the inaccuracy costs people something.
“The island isn't comfort. It's a container.”
A container is whatever was organising your life - a job, a marriage, a professional identity, a country, a business, a belief you held about yourself. Something you built routine around, made decisions inside of, oriented yourself by. It doesn't have to have felt good to have been doing that work. Plenty of people leave containers that were making them miserable and still find the water brutal. This is something comfort-zone language can't explain, because if it was just about ease, leaving something uncomfortable should feel like relief, not disintegration.
What the container was actually giving you was safety. And safety comes in more than one currency. It can be financial. Relational. Psychological. A sense of competence, knowing you were good at the thing. A sense of identity, knowing who you were in relation to it. Usually it's several of these at once, which is why losing one container can dismantle more of you than seems reasonable from the outside.
Why it costs so much
I'd argue liminal space takes more out of you than a genuinely packed, back-to-back day. That sounds wrong until you look at what each is actually asking of you.
A busy day is expensive in time. You're racing the clock, but the clock has a direction - there's a next task, a deadline, an endpoint you can see. However hard it is, you know which way you're moving.
Liminal space is expensive in orientation. There's no fixed point to swim against. You don't know if you're going the right way, how far you have left, or whether you should be moving at all. Your own thoughts and doubts just echo, with nothing solid to absorb them.
“Liminal space is expensive in orientation.”
Swimming, physiologically, is one of the more metabolically demanding things a body can do: sustained, whole-body, no rest position available the way there is on land. That's psychologically true as well. Holding yourself upright with nothing underneath you is active, continuous work, even when nothing visible is happening.
The questions that come with it
I think of conversations I've had with people who've stepped off the expected path: left a steady job, not paired off when their friends are, rebuilding at a point where it was meant to be settled.
The questions people often ask aren't really about the decision itself, but further down than that:
Who am I becoming? Is this the right direction? Can I keep going? Can I even do this? Was it a mistake?
I know those questions. Not just professionally, I know the shape of them from the inside. They don't get answered by more effort, and they don't get answered by other people's reassurance, because the honest answer to most of them is: you don't know yet, and you won't for a while. That's not a failure of the process. It's the process.
What actually helps
Not swimming faster.
If liminal space is expensive because there's no fixed point, then the useful move isn't to push harder against nothing — it's to find whatever partial fixed points you can. A person. A practice. A place. A version of yourself you still recognise, even briefly. Something that gives you a moment of orientation in water that otherwise offers none.
And permission to slow your stroke without treating that as losing ground. You're not behind. There isn't a schedule. The task was never speed.
The task is to survive the swim.
