Understanding Liminal Space: 4 Reflections on Experiencing Grief During the Pandemic
“To be thrown down the well is to find yourself at the mercy of inner and outer forces beyond your conscious control. Above all, such a descent will initially involve multiple losses, including the loss of freedom, the loss of control, and even the loss of yourself.”
—Lisa Marchiano, Motherhood
When I read this passage, I underlined it and wrote PANDEMIC in the margins. While she's describing the initial descent into motherhood, I couldn't help but latch on to a new way to describe what weathering the pandemic has felt like—because it’s a lot like this: a loss of freedom, of control, and of self.
If you also feel like you've been thrown down the well this season, you are not alone.
What Is Liminal Space?
The way I think of liminal space generally is it’s a season of transition, the time between what was and what’s to come, and there are generally two kinds. There’s a planned liminal space, where we might know in advance something is coming, like our kids might be out of school for the summer, or one is graduating from high school. These are hard dates on the calendar that we know are coming up. And then there’s the unplanned liminal space, which the pandemic is an excellent example of.
4 Ways to Move Through Liminal Space
This is a topic that can very easily go in a lot of different directions so to keep things a bit more organized, I wanted to talk about liminal space and writing and the pandemic as it relates to a few pillars. You can think of them like hallmarks of the season, and I have four that have come up these past two years:
Recognizing and making space for grief
Adopting new schedules and routines
Being comfortable with discomfort (or at least trying to be)
Re-Entry: Considering a post-liminal space experience
Recognizing and making space for grief
There are so many ways liminal space has blanketed the pandemic years, and the most immediate is that weekend in March 2020 when everyone across the country, and eventually the world, had a moment when some kind of stay at home order was announced. You left work or picked up your kids from school, stockpiled some staples from the grocery store, and suddenly we all walked into this long, dark tunnel that no one had any clue how we would get out of.
I remember being in Target a day or two before the shutdown started where I live and seeing that now iconic image of the paper goods aisle being obliterated, just completely empty. No toilet paper. No paper towels.
On that Sunday, when most parents found out schools would be going virtual for what was believed to be maybe a week or two, my Instagram feed was covered in pictures of little tables decorated for school, and captions saying “Ok Monday, let’s do this” with that arm muscle emoji. Everyone just rallied, tried to figure it out, and I felt detached from it all because we were in a gap year with school. My son had been in preschool and was about to start a pre-K program there, but he wasn’t old enough to start kindergarten at his public school, so we didn’t have anything to join other than the occasional story time with his teachers.
And of course, one week wasn’t just one week.
And the crushing weight of this new reality quickly morphed into something else entirely, that wasn’t laced with optimism and a “we can do it” attitude. For a while, I didn’t know what to call it, but it turned out to be: GRIEF.
All at once feelings of helplessness, concern, worry, separateness. All of it, every day, relentless.
In March 2020, Harvard Business Review published an article called: “That Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief.” It was an interview with David Kessler who co-wrote a book called On Grief and Grieving and it named, very clearly, that grief many of us had been circling around.
“We feel the world has changed, and it has. We know this is temporary, but it doesn’t feel that way, and we realize things will be different,” he says. “Just as going to the airport is forever different from how it was before 9/11, things will change and this is the point at which they changed. The loss of normalcy; the fear of economic toll; the loss of connection. This is hitting us and we’re grieving. Collectively. We are not used to this kind of collective grief in the air.”
And then he goes on to define something called anticipatory grief, which is a grief we get about what the future holds when we’re plagued with uncertainty.
“With a virus, this kind of grief is so confusing for people. Our primitive mind knows something bad is happening, but you can’t see it. This breaks our sense of safety. We’re feeling that loss of safety. I don’t think we’ve collectively lost our sense of general safety like this. Individually or as smaller groups, people have felt this. But all together, this is new. We are grieving on a micro and a macro level.”
The article offers three suggestions for how to manage these feelings: stay in the present moment, release what you can’t control, and “stock up on compassion,” as he puts it.
Personally, I’ve found that compassion—both towards myself and others—has been one of the big lessons of the pandemic.
I came across a quote I really love by Robert Gonzales in Reflections on Living Compassion that says: “Self-compassion is approaching ourselves, our inner experience with spaciousness, with the quality of allowing which has a quality of gentleness. Instead of our usual tendency to want to get over something, to fix it, to make it go away, the path of compassion is totally different. Compassion allows.”
Compassion allows. I just love that sentiment and I’m trying to hang on to it whenever I can. And allowing is really the first step, isn’t it? Just to acknowledge that this grief is there and to allow it to exist in our hearts and our homes. That’s always the first thing to do.
2. Developing new schedules and routines
In the midst of feeling our way through grief in those early days—which was both a physical and emotional experience—we simultaneously needed to do something decidedly more practical and tactile, which was to develop new schedules and routines.
For us, it took until sometime over the summer in 2020 to decide what our new plan was going to be, which became a combination of Montessori activities at home, yoga in the Cosmic Kids app, cartoons, some quiet time, lots of outdoor play, and baking projects, mostly.
My writing routine went through a lot of ups and downs that year, mostly because things kept changing all the time. I talked a little bit about this in Episode 24 of the podcast so I won’t repeat everything here but let’s just say I spent a lot of time working on my laptop in his bedroom while my son played.
It was writing in the margins on complete overdrive. Between my freelance work during the day, writing haiku while I took the dog outside, and feeling the pull to work on my memoir, chaos and cortisol was really fueling that period.
It probably took the better part of a year to really sink into routines to the point where they started feeling more habitual, and then my son, eventually, went back to school a year and a half later, so that became a new transition to sort out, where I actually had the chance to take a deep breath and feel out my days again in the ways I had before the pandemic started.
3. Being comfortable with discomfort
Moving on to the third pillar, being comfortable with discomfort. Because wow, there was a lot of discomfort. I’m still not sure I’m actually comfortable with a lot of things about covid, BUT I’ve found some ways to manage those feelings and recognize them in ways that don’t feel quite so overwhelming as they used to.
When I think about discomfort, one thing that came to mind as I was reflecting and putting together this show was the decision to close my Facebook group.
And I have sort of a cautionary tale for you about liminal space so you can hopefully avoid a recent mistake I made. Or, maybe not a mistake, but I realized in hindsight that I didn’t give myself enough space after I’d made that decision.
Since early 2021, I’d been thinking about what might be coming next for my community. I started it in 2016, and in the summer I’d come up on the five year anniversary, which felt like a nice chunk of time to mark. I was starting to feel pulled away from it, and giving a lot of thought to this closure happening. And like I usually do, I think about things for a long time so months went by, I wanted to make sure it felt like the right decision, and it did.
I let my community know and spent several weeks leading up to it talking about it and sharing reflective posts, so it wasn’t just this sudden choice that happened, at least I hoped it didn’t feel sudden. Although I felt like I did the closure part really well, I realized afterwards that part of me was scared of not having this community, and I just became so excited about Instagram and I genuinely wanted to spend more time there and build a writing community on this other platform. But after a few months, my energy sort of fizzled out, and I think this was in part because I was also working on my memoir so I didn’t have the capacity for too many other things.
And what I should have done, I realize now, is to trust the unfolding.
I was scared of not being able to direct people somewhere. I wanted to be able to say, “join the community on Instagram” so the transition would be seamless and wouldn’t just leave people who had been part of this community for a long time and they would have somewhere else to go.
But that was at the expense of what I was able to give at that time. And it taught me, or re-taught me, a lesson I already knew but that was just the reminder that when I’m in the middle of a book project, that’s it. That’s my focus. Everything else depletes my energy, which I really need to protect when I’m doing something as intensive as writing a book.
When we’re uncomfortable, it’s so easy to make quick decisions to avoid feeling the discomfort and sitting with it, which is most likely the opposite of what we actually need at that moment.
And for this pillar, a quote by Megan Devine, author of It’s Ok That You’re Not Ok offers a beautiful reminder: “The new model of grief is not in cleaning it up and making it go away; it’s in finding new and beautiful ways to inhabit what hurts.”
4. Re-entry post-liminal space
While it’s true that aspects of our life are becoming more recognizable, at the time of this writing,we’re still contending with a global virus. This period feels especially tender, and I still find myself spiraling into new depths of frustration, concern, and worry, which has led me to think a lot about the idea of capacity recently.
Specifically, what are we capable of doing, given our current set of circumstances?
(A secondary question might be: What are we also willing and wanting to do?)
In a way, this isn’t a new question for me. Ever since I started my first full-time job after graduating from college, I’ve been trying to understand the delicate balance between career, writing, and family life.
The advice I give in Wild Words, and I continue to offer is that of getting radically honest with what your circumstances look like, and adjust accordingly. I’ve long been familiar with reducing the scope of my creative work to fit within constraints. And of course, I did that during the pandemic. Then, after a year-and-a-half of this new way of functioning, my son went back to school. That was an enormous transition.
It would have been easy for me to pile on things I’ve been meaning to do for months, but this transition required both patience and compassion. That’s why, when I’m clearly rooted in liminal space, I often decide to give myself permission not to make any decisions for a while.
At the time I read the book Motherhood, I was craving time with my notebook, walks around the lake, watching an entire movie in one sitting, and at-home pedicures. I was longing to get back to basics with my writing, in ways I haven’t done since pre-pandemic times. Just me and the page, no pressure or plan.
As important and life-giving as it is to me, book writing can also be depleting. One way to help restore my relationship to creativity is by making it simple again: pen and paper. So if you’re feeling a familiar stagnancy or stuckness, I invite you to toss out concrete plans, and consider ways you might feel your way through instead.
In the shadow of a pandemic, this is not always an easy task. As Tara Brach writes, “sorrow and joy are woven inextricably together. When we distract ourselves from the reality of loss, we also distract ourselves from the beauty, creativity, and mystery of this ever-changing world.”
This disorienting season has shifted and changed, and most of us are still in it. I don’t know about you, but one of the ways I’m navigating my way through is by reading and writing. Let this gift of yours be an anchor, as much as possible, as the days continue to unfold and we continue to do the best we can with the information we have, in this unpredictable world of ours.
