Essay · 5 min read
The strange grief of living between who you were and who you are becoming
On liminal seasons, feeling behind, and the loss nobody sends flowers for.
There is a kind of grief that arrives without a funeral. Nobody sends flowers. Nobody asks how you are holding up, because from the outside nothing has obviously been lost. You have simply stopped being who you were, and you have not yet become whoever comes next.
I have come to think this is one of the most under-acknowledged experiences a person can have. We have language for bereavement. We have very little language for the quieter losses — the career that ended, the faith that changed shape, the version of yourself you had to put down in order to keep going.
The lie of arrival
Most of us are raised on the idea that life is a series of destinations. Qualify, marry, buy, build, arrive. The trouble is that the arrivals never quite hold. You get there and discover the place you were aiming for is another waiting room with better furniture.
So we assume the in-between is a fault. A delay. A gap between the real parts of a life. And we spend the middle either apologising for it or trying to sprint through it.
But most of a life is lived exactly there. Liminal comes from the Latin for threshold — the condition of being neither here nor there. If the middle is the majority of the experience, then treating it as an interruption means treating most of your life as an interruption.
Why it feels like grief, because it is
The in-between hurts because something genuinely has died. Not a person, but a self — the one who knew what he was for, who had the answers, who fitted the room he was standing in. That self was real, and you loved him, and he is not coming back in the same form.
What makes it lonely is that the loss is invisible. You are expected to function normally through it, and mostly you do. You meet the deadline. You make the school run. And underneath, something is quietly dismantling and rebuilding itself with no timeline and no supervision.
You are not behind
The sentence I return to most often is this: you are not behind, you are in transit, and there is a difference.
Behind implies a schedule that everyone else is meeting and you are not. In transit implies movement — that you are somewhere specific, going somewhere real, and the discomfort is the normal experience of being between two points rather than proof of failure.
Nobody can tell you how long it lasts. Anyone who offers you a timeline is guessing. But the length is the wrong question. The better one is: what would it look like to stop treating this season as wasted?
What actually helps
Name the loss out loud, to at least one person. Unnamed grief does not go quiet; it goes underground and comes back as irritability, numbness or exhaustion.
Lower the demand for clarity. You do not have to know what comes next in order to live well today. Certainty is not a prerequisite for faithfulness.
Notice what you are carrying that you no longer need. Every threshold I have crossed has asked me to leave something behind, and every place I have left has put something holy in my hands. The question is not how to keep everything. It is what can honestly come with you.
And be careful of the people who rush you. Some of them mean well. But the ones worth keeping close during a transition are the ones who can sit in an unresolved thing without needing to fix it — who do not pretend the delay is nothing, who do not rush the grief, who do not perform certainty they do not have.
The holy middle
Transit is not a failure of life. It is the condition of it. The gate you are standing at is not punishment. It is pilgrimage — and you are allowed to arrive unfinished.
This essay grew out of Between Arrivals and Departures — A Companion for People in Transit, releasing September 2026. More essays.
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