On the loneliness of seeming okay

Nobody tells you it comes in waves.

You expect the hard thing — if you’re honest you can feel it coming sometimes — but you expect it to arrive once. To cost you once. To ask everything of you once and then be done.

That’s not how it works.

The wilderness arrives in waves. One recedes before you’ve caught your breath and another is already coming. The marriage. The diagnosis. The financial unraveling. The friends who didn’t fail you on purpose, they just couldn’t see the weight.

Because you seemed okay.

You were not okay. You were spiraling inward while performing okay outward. And the distance between those two things — between what people saw and what was actually happening inside you — is one of the loneliest places a person can live.

I have spent a decade studying how humans flourish — and a harder, more specific period of time learning what nobody studies: how they survive the in-between. I know this not only because I researched it. I lived it. Not once. In waves. Each one arriving before I had finished surviving the last.

And what nobody told me, what I had to find the hard way, through research and through the specific education of having your life come apart, is that the disorientation was supposed to happen.

Not as punishment. Not as failure. As design.

There is a word for where you are.

Liminal. It comes from the Latin word for threshold — the strip of wood at the bottom of a doorway. The anthropologist Arnold van Gennep spent his life studying what happens to people when they cross thresholds — when the life that made sense stops making sense and the new one hasn’t yet arrived.

He called the in-between the liminal phase. And he noticed something that should relieve you:

Every culture across every century has recognized this phase as inherently disorienting. Not because something is wrong with the person crossing the threshold. Because the threshold itself does this. It dissolves the old identity before the new one has formed. It strips away the frameworks and the roles and the relationships that told you who you were, and leaves you standing in the space between.

That space is supposed to feel like this.

The unrest isn’t evidence that you’re failing to heal. It’s evidence that you’re in the middle of something real.

Across cultures and across centuries there is a consistent understanding that the wilderness — the in-between, the liminal space — is not an accident. It is not a detour. It is the necessary geography between who you were and who you are becoming.

Mary, the mother of Jesus knew it. She was handed something too large to explain and too sacred to rush. And she did the only honest thing available to her.

She pondered. She held it. She let it be as large as it actually was without rushing it toward resolution.

If you don’t share this framework, that’s okay. The truth of the wilderness holds regardless of the tradition you bring to it. Every human being who has ever stood at a threshold has felt this. The disorientation is not cultural. It is human.

What I want you to know

If you are in the middle of your own unraveling — this:

The disorientation is not a sign that you’re doing it wrong.

The fact that it came in waves rather than once — that you survived one thing only to face another — is not evidence that you are uniquely cursed or particularly fragile.

It is evidence that you are human. And that the wilderness, by design, asks more of us than we thought we had.

The waves keep coming. And somewhere between surviving one and bracing for the next — slowly, uncomfortably, one held thing at a time — something truer begins to emerge.

Not resolved. Not finished. Not on the other side yet.

But becoming.

That’s what the wilderness is for.

You don’t have to feel that yet. You just have to know it.

The becoming is happening even when you can’t feel it moving.

— Bukola Omotayo. For the woman in the in-between.

Limen is a quiet 90-day journey for women in the in-between. Begin with the six questions →