Rising Rooted

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The other day I stepped outside and immediately regretted what I was wearing.

Too warm for my winter coat. Too cold without it. The ground was that strange mix of snow and mud, where everything is softening but nothing has fully changed yet. I stood there for a second, debating whether to go back in and fix it… and then just didn’t.

That feels about right for this time of year.

The sun is back, and when it hits your face it’s almost shocking—like, oh right, this is what warmth feels like. After a winter that felt long in my bones, that kind of warmth is hard to describe. It wakes something up.

And at the same time, I can feel the edges of burnout in myself.

That familiar pattern—energy rising faster than my body can actually sustain. Saying yes to things, booking too much, wanting to be out in the world again, wanting to connect, create, move… and then hitting that point where something in me quietly says: this is too much.

It’s a bit of a false start. My brain is in spring. My body is… not quite there yet.

So I’m pulling back. Recalibrating. Reminding myself that just because the light has returned doesn’t mean I have to sprint toward it.

This is the part of spring we don’t really talk about.

Not the bloom. Not the clarity… The in-between.

Liminality: the threshold space

There’s a word for this: liminality.

I first came across it through more witchy, hedge-crossing spaces—the idea of the “hedge” as a boundary between worlds. Not a place you stay forever, but a place you pass through. A threshold.

And what struck me wasn’t just the definition—it was the way it was understood.

Liminal spaces weren’t framed as problems. They were seen as potent. As places where the usual rules loosen, where identity isn’t fixed, where something new can begin to take shape.

That landed like relief. Because I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling just outside of things. Not fully inside the norms, but not entirely outside them either. Close enough to see how things work, far enough to feel like I don’t quite belong.

To have a word for that—and to see it framed as something meaningful rather than something to fix—shifted something in me.

Maybe this isn’t a failure to land. Maybe this is a threshold. And maybe some of us don’t just pass through these spaces quickly. Maybe we learn how to live near the edge of them. How to make some kind of home there.

Life transitions and the fog between

This kind of space shows up most clearly during life transitions.

When something in you has already decided—sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly—I can’t keep being who I was. But there’s no clear replacement yet.

You might leave a job, shift your identity, step out of a relationship, or simply outgrow the way you’ve been moving through the world. And suddenly the old version of you doesn’t fit—but the new one isn’t solid either.

So you end up in this stretch of fog. Trying things on. Pulling back. Feeling both more honest and less defined at the same time.

This is where a lot of people panic. Because we’re taught to move quickly here—to define the next step, to create a plan, to stabilize as soon as possible.

But this phase—the undefined, uncomfortable, in-progress part—is often where the most meaningful change is actually happening.

It’s the cocoon.

And if you’ve ever really thought about a cocoon—not the tidy metaphor, but the biological reality—it’s not a clean transformation. The old structure dissolves before anything new takes form.

There’s a kind of necessary disorganization there. We just don’t tend to honour that in ourselves.

Not broken. Not mirrored.

There’s another version of liminality I see often in therapy.

People who don’t feel fully reflected anywhere.

They’ve explored diagnostic frameworks. Maybe some parts resonate—attention differences, emotional intensity, sensory sensitivity—but nothing quite captures the full picture.

So they end up in this middle space: In some environments, they’re seen as “too much”—too sensitive, too deep, too reactive, too complex. In others, they’re seen as “fine”—functional enough, capable enough, not struggling enough to warrant support.

That gap creates something painful. Because if you’re “too much” in one place and “not enough” in another, where do you actually belong?

What I see happen, over and over, is this cycle: masking, over-functioning, trying on identities, researching diagnoses, questioning who am I, really?

Sometimes people go looking for a label hoping it will offer relief. And sometimes it does. But often, especially for relatively functional adults, those systems don’t actually offer much in terms of real support. No meaningful resources. No deeper understanding of your specific patterning.

Just a category that only partially fits.

And when that happens, the search can start to feel demoralizing. Because no diagnostic framework is designed to hold the full complexity of a human being.

So I’ll say it again, clearly: Not broken. Just not mirrored effectively.

Modern systems don’t like the in-between

Part of why this feels so hard isn’t just personal—it’s systemic.

We live inside systems that are built to categorize, streamline, and move people along.

Medical systems that ask you to bring one issue at a time, even when your experience is clearly interconnected. Psychological systems that rely on diagnostic boxes that can’t fully hold complexity. Economic systems that reward clarity, productivity, and forward momentum. Social Media spaces that turn identity into something curated, branded, and easily recognizable.

Even here—especially here—it can start to look like everyone else has a clear “thing.” A defined identity. A niche. A coherent self.

But what you’re often seeing is a version of someone that has been shaped for visibility. It’s not their full humanity. It’s a curated slice.

And when you compare your lived, messy, contradictory experience to someone else’s curated clarity, of course you’re going to feel like you don’t quite fit.

Liminality doesn’t translate well in these systems. It’s slow. It’s undefined. It resists being packaged. So it gets framed as confusion, or stuckness, or something to fix quickly.

But rushing out of it often means abandoning something important.

A different kind of belonging

If you’ve allowed yourself to spend some time in these middle spaces, something starts to shift.

Belonging stops being about finding the perfect label or fitting neatly into a category. It becomes more about recognizing yourself. Your patterns. Your rhythms. Your sensitivities. Your ways of moving through the world—even when they don’t line up cleanly with existing frameworks.

And from there, connection starts to look different too. Less about “we are the same” and more about “something in me recognizes something in you.”

It’s quieter. Less obvious.

But often more real.

Anchors for the in-between

When you’re in a liminal space, the instinct is often to rush toward certainty. But what tends to help more is finding anchors that don’t collapse the space—just help you move through it.

1. The pause (a somatic anchor)

Let your breath come and go naturally. And then, for a few rounds, bring your attention to the pause at the end of the inhale… and the pause at the end of the exhale.

Don’t control it. Just notice it. Linger for a second—like you would with a taste you’re trying to savour.

Most people feel a subtle discomfort here. A pull to move things along.

Stay with it, just briefly.

And notice—when you pay attention to the pause, does the breath have more to do? A little more air to release, or a fuller inhale waiting to arrive?

The pause isn’t pointless. It’s part of the cycle. It just usually passes by unnoticed.

2. The archetypal thread (a symbolic anchor)

If everything feels undefined, it can help to orient—not with a rigid identity, but with an image.

An archetype. A symbol. A character. Something that loosely reflects the direction you feel pulled toward. Not something to become perfectly. Just something to walk alongside.

You might choose a figure—a mythic character, an animal, a role—and spend some time with it.

Learn about it. Read its stories. Notice how it shows up across cultures. Pay attention to both its light and its shadow.

Then start a dialogue. Through writing. Through art. Through quiet imagination.

Let it become a kind of inner guide—not telling you who to be, but helping you stay oriented while you’re finding your way.

3. Making peace with liminal spaces (an eco ritual)

If you can, go outside into this early spring landscape.

Let yourself notice the places where things overlap—snow melting into water, ground softening, edges blurring. And instead of waiting for it to become “beautiful” in the conventional sense, see if you can find beauty here.

In the mess. In the transition. In the not-quite-formed.

Stay there a little longer than usual. Not trying to resolve it.

Just letting yourself recognize: this, too, is a phase with its own kind of life.

There’s a certain steadiness that comes when you stop trying to rush yourself out of these spaces. When you learn to love yourself through the muck.

When you let things be unfinished for a while. When you allow identity to loosen before it reforms.

It’s not always comfortable. But it is often where the most honest shifts begin.

And if you’re here—between versions, between definitions, between ways of being— you’re not behind. You’re in the middle of something uniquely yours.

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If this spoke to something in you, there are a few paths you can follow from here:

Each door leads somewhere different. It is my hope that all of them lead back to you.

<3 Rachel