What is a liminal season?

Most women never get the word for where they are.

They get diagnoses for it. They get advice about it. They get told to push through it, to get back out there, to find their next chapter. What they don’t get is the word that would let them stop treating it like a personal failure and start recognizing it for what it is.

A liminal season. The in-between. The threshold. The stretch of life after the old version of yourself has dissolved and before the new one has fully formed. The relationship that ended, or the one that is quietly ending. The career that no longer fits. The diagnosis. The move. The faith that cracked. The friendship that went quiet. The motherhood chapter that closed. The version of you that other people still expect to walk into the room — and the version of you that actually arrives now, who is no longer her.

If no one has named this for you, the disorientation feels like failure. It is not. It is geography. And once you can see the geography, you can stop trying to escape it and start moving through it.

Where the word comes from

Liminal comes from the Latin limen — the strip of wood at the bottom of a doorway. The threshold. Not the room you left. Not the room you’re entering. The board under your feet that belongs to neither.

In 1909, the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep noticed that every culture he studied — across continents, across centuries — marked life’s major transitions with the same three-part structure. A separation from the old life. A liminal phase in the middle. A reincorporation into the new life. The middle phase was always the longest, the strangest, and the most disorienting. He called it liminality.

Decades later, the anthropologist Victor Turner picked up the word and wrote about what happens to a person inside it. The old roles stop fitting. The old language stops working. Time gets strange. You feel both invisible and exposed. You are, in his phrase, betwixt and between — no longer who you were and not yet who you will be.

Every culture has known this. Most modern lives have forgotten it. Which is why, when it happens to you, you assume something is wrong with you specifically. There isn’t. You are inside a structure humans have always recognized. You just weren’t handed the map.

What a liminal season feels like

A liminal season is not depression, although it can look like one from the outside. It is not a breakdown, although you may have one inside it. It has its own texture, and once you have felt it you recognize it everywhere.

A sense that the language you used to describe your life no longer fits — the words for your work, your relationships, your purpose, all slightly off, like a coat that doesn’t hang right anymore.

Time moving strangely. Whole weeks compressed into a blur. A single afternoon stretching out for what feels like a season. The calendar pretending to be normal while inside you something much slower is happening.

Loneliness that has nothing to do with how many people are around you. The people who know the old version of you can still see her. They reach for her in conversation. You have to decide, every time, whether to perform her or let them feel the gap.

A loss of appetite for things that used to satisfy you — the projects, the conversations, the goals — without yet having a clear appetite for what comes next. The old hunger is gone. The new one hasn’t arrived.

And waves. The wilderness does not arrive once and finish. It comes in waves. One recedes before you’ve caught your breath, and another is already coming.

Why it’s so lonely

Because the people around you mostly want you to be okay. Not out of cruelty. Out of love, and out of their own discomfort with sitting in something unresolved. So you learn to perform okay. And the distance between seeming okay and being okay becomes the loneliest place a woman can live.

The wilderness is also lonely because the categories we have for hard seasons don’t quite fit. You are not grieving in the way people understand grieving. You are not sick in the way people understand sick. You are not lost in the way people understand lost. You are in a transition that has no clean name, no expected duration, and no socially recognized ritual. So you walk through it largely unaccompanied.

The loneliness is not evidence that something is wrong with you. It is evidence that we have stopped giving women language for the threshold. The threshold itself has not changed. Only our willingness to name it has.

What the wilderness is actually doing

It is removing what was never yours.

The performances you built to fit rooms that were too small. The labels you accepted because arguing with them cost more than carrying them. The version of competence you led with because your full depth made people uncomfortable. The careful edits. The smaller questions. The agreeable yes.

All of it gets too expensive to maintain in a liminal season. Something in you stops being able to afford it. Not dramatically. Quietly. One small refusal at a time, until the whole performance becomes too heavy and you set it down.

What remains, after the unnecessary has been stripped away, is closer to who you actually are. That is the work the wilderness is doing while you think nothing is happening.

How to move through it

Slowly. On purpose. With more honesty than you are used to.

I cannot give you a method, because the wilderness does not respond to methods. It responds to presence. But after a decade of studying how women flourish, and a harder education in surviving my own threshold, I can tell you what the women who came through a liminal season well had in common.

They stopped trying to skip it. The instinct to rush toward the next clear identity is what keeps you stuck. The wilderness will not be optimized. It will be inhabited. The faster you try to move through it, the longer it tends to take.

They told the truth in small places first. Not to everyone. To one or two people who could hold the unresolved version of them without trying to fix her. Being seen accurately by even one person changes what the threshold costs you.

They paid attention to what was being removed. Not only what hurt to lose, but what was quietly leaving without being missed. Those departures are information. They are telling you what was never actually yours.

And they stopped trying to declare themselves prematurely. They let the threshold be a threshold. They didn’t need a new title for it, a new vocabulary for it, a new five-year plan for it. They let it do its work.

What is on the other side

Not a tidier version of the old life. A truer one.

Women who come through a liminal season well — and many do — describe a quieter relationship to their own life. Less performance. Less explaining. A clearer sense of what is actually theirs to carry and what they were carrying for everyone else. The same person, mostly. With less of what wasn’t hers.

You will not feel that yet. You don’t have to. You only have to know that the disorientation is the work, not a sign that you are failing the work.

You are not lost. You are in a liminal season. There is a word for where you are, and now you have it.

— 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 →