Liminal Spaces

What if your mind makes your whole world feel like a liminal space?

December 18, 2017

I spend a lot of time with one foot in reality — the here and now — and the other in my own kind of unreality. It’s kind of like living in Wonderland while having a window into the real world.

It’s fascinating in its own way. I’ve always been in that in-between somehow, so maybe it’s just a state of being that’s more natural to me than it should be.

I’ve written things before to try to explain all of it, although most who have read them say they look more like word salad than anything comprehensible. I'd like to post one of them here for the sake of it since I have this unshakable desire for people to understand. I wrote it about three years ago when I was at my lowest, so there is sensitive subject matter and mentions of self-harm. It may be best to skip it if you are in a difficult place with mental health.

Drifting through wood-barren cases and grayed-out walls, the frightening images in the distance welcome me yet horrify me. Faces indescribable, distortions clacking teeth of impossible length. Flat, horse teeth in canine mouths with minuscule eyes surrounded in white and red. Doll faces of antiquity twisting and thwarting my senses with their raised eyebrows and wide-eyed madness, mouths curved sideways to follow my mirrored mask of horrors.

I cannot confront you but merely watch with dread as you inquire me -- speculate what frightens me the most. Or is this just a grotesque waking dream that I will never know the ending to? Not a dream, but a waking nightmare that is experienced lucidly in reality or on the fringes of reality. Your plastic visage can only mock me here on this fringe, yet what is the most tormenting fact of all is that I live in this very fringe and fabric that reality barely sheers through.

You, terrible Voice in my head. Upon waking, you've already begun your one-way conversation of deprecation. You allow me not even a moment's glance at the rising sun before you relentlessly beat me down with your disgusting vocabulary. It is your job to remind me of my failures -- of the lies and deceptions humanity has force-fed down my small, dry throat.

My own flesh and blood are a common recurrence in your cruelest musings, Voice. You gambol about their empty promises, lies, and negligence. You remind me of companions lost, never to return, you remind me. My heart is their playground as has been proven one too many a time, as you are so kind to recall for me, Voice.

I drown you beneath the bass of somber tones and instruments, and I blind you with the smoke that emanates from the nicotine-fueled poison seeping into my brain. Even then you manage to spit on my musings as I write, sour my journal pages with your word vomit. You drive me to my one last resort -- the final coping method when nothing else can blot you out of existence.

At one time this blade brought me beauty. Now this weapon of choice brings only destruction as it splits the very skin it sought to keep clean. I cannot remain clean while I am in love with you, Voice. You remind me of this simple vice that can silence you, therefore I beckon to you when the intensity gains in volume. You put gentle pressure on the fast-forward button as my mind fills with racing memories I fail to catch. I cannot keep up with you now, Voice. I must continue in my attempts to blot you out.

It burns. It causes so much pain to have you remain silent if only for a short time. My skin turns from pale to red -- it tears and pops open in response to my final pleas to you, Voice. To make you become silent. And yet, I've finally done enough. Before the apathy has set in, before my visage becomes stone, you are long gone. You've got what you wanted, and as I sit with this horrid instrument of destruction in hand, I realize that everything is once again silent.

But for how long?

Perhaps I will meet you here tomorrow, Voice. Then we will continue this sadistic friendship once more. How I would love to enlighten you, yet be rid of you all the same. Until tomorrow, you glutton.

—November 4, 2014

It's a more intricate way of wording the personification of my abusive Voice. I often wonder if I’ll ever get to meet the source, and I'm certain it isn’t any of my current alters or spirit guides. Maybe they are doing their best to keep the true identity of this Voice far from me. If nothing else, whoever or whatever this Voice is, it enjoys my suffering.

Of course, It could be that the Voice is my own brain but split into two people, and the second half is my worst enemy.

The reason I named this entry Liminal Spaces is because it’s probably the best way to describe my in-betweens on the border of reality. The basic definition of a liminal space is:

'Liminal' means 'relating to a transitional stage' or 'occupying a position at both sides of a boundary.'

—Places Where Reality Feels Altered

It’s a feeling of being displaced in space and time, or a place where space and time don’t seem to exist. The links in the quote provide some examples of everyday places and times people often associate with liminal spaces.

But what if your mind makes your whole world feel like a liminal space? Liminal spaces that you live in day to day when not seemingly in any location or time that is usually attributed to them? Maybe it’s my creativity getting carried away, or maybe it’s something spiritual. I don’t think there’s ever going to be a clear answer, but as for the piece I wrote in 2014 quoted above, I'd tried to explain that odd liminal space I find myself in often. The result is poetic fumbling through words in an attempt to describe the indescribable.

How do you describe things, places, or entities that don’t resemble figures, patterns, or shapes that humans know to exist? I guess, in that sense, a liminal space could be best defined as something that doesn’t even have a definition. Maybe the definition is different for everyone because the feeling of a liminal space is highly personal.

As for myself, although the consensus says that liminal spaces should make you feel anxious or uncomfortable, I love them and I find comfort in them.

More about liminal spaces:

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