Why now? Why this week? Why these feelings that rise in my chest and leave me both breathless and grateful?

Maybe it was ordering the cap and gown. Maybe it was sitting at the first competition of the last marching band season, watching my son take the field. Maybe it’s just the way silence settles differently when a chapter is closing.

All I know is I’m standing in a blur. A space between who I’ve been and who I’m becoming. A threshold. A liminal space.

And when I look around in this hallway, I see them—the women I’ve been—standing in the doorways.

Silent. Knowing. Beautiful. Inspiring.

Each one carries a fragment of me I once gave away. They don’t call me back. They don’t demand I stay. They simply hold out their hands, offering me pieces of myself I had forgotten, whispering that I can walk forward whole.

They are not ghosts. They are guides.
The bones of the temple I sit in now.
The rivers of wisdom, leading me toward the sea.

It is humbling, almost holy, to walk past them now. To see them clearly in ways I couldn’t when I was them. To honor them, bless them, listen to them. To realize I will always walk this hallway. From time to time, I’ll step into a room, learn what it has to teach me, and then leave that woman there—another guide, another fragment, another keeper of wisdom.

The Work of the Liminal

Liminal comes from the Latin limen: threshold. Anthropologists used it to name the middle stage of rites of passage—after the old identity has been stripped away, before the new one has formed. That’s what this is: the cocoon, the chrysalis, the bridge.

What do you do when you’re here?

• Don’t rush it. Don’t force it. Let the space shape you.
• Listen to the ache instead of numbing it.
• Honor the longing instead of dismissing it.
• Let gratitude and grief braid themselves together until they teach you what only they can.

The Mirrors in the Hallway

Here, in this blur, my children hold up the clearest mirrors of all.

My oldest—the joy-bringer, the room-lifter, the one who has always had a song on her lips—reflects back to me the freedom to express joy I once denied myself. She reminds me that joy doesn’t wait for perfect conditions. It sings anyway.

My middle—the truth-teller, the steady fire, the one who gives me the words I need even when they sting—reflects my own independence, my no-nonsense flame, the honesty I sometimes tuck away. She reminds me that love without truth isn’t love at all.

My youngest—the bold performer, the one who fills a room with sound and refuses to hide—reflects my secret longing to be seen, to take the stage, to live boldly without apology. He reminds me that heart isn’t meant to stay quiet. It’s meant to be heard.

I thought I was raising them, but really, they’ve been raising me. Their slow sidestep into independence has become the mirror that shows me my own. And it is both ache and blessing to see myself reflected in them while trying to remember who I am on my own.

That’s what this blur feels like—simultaneously losing yourself and finding yourself.

It feels like standing in the doorway of a plane at 14,000 feet, heart racing before the skydive. The ride up is thrilling, the free fall exhilarating, the float down breathtaking—but the magic lives in the jump. The moment of no return. The headfirst leap into freedom.

That’s where I am now. At the jump.

My Practice for the Blur: the Enso

A single brushstroke circle. One breath. One stroke. Whole and imperfect. Empty and complete.

The Enso is the visual embodiment of liminal space. Each time I draw one, it feels like both a release and a return—a release of my children, of the thousand women, of the roles I no longer have to carry; and a return to myself, after all the fragments I placed in their hands, after all the women who held what I could not.

Maybe that’s the work of this season—to learn to live as an Enso. To let go and come full circle. To walk the hallway, honor the women, bless the mirrors, and still step into the blur with gratitude.

Because I am no longer only who I was.
And I am not yet fully who I will be.
But I am here. In the circle. In the blur. At the jump.

And maybe that is enough.

—Ang