We moved. We vaguely imagined a new way of life for our family, packed up our memories in the form of things, and drove a long distance. Our boxed memories have been unpacked, but our old rhythms remain enclosed in our muscles. We’ve been here for just about eight weeks now and if I’m honest, it feels a bit like, “Well, that was a nice long vacation. Time to go home.”

This move has really challenged the word “home” for me. For my whole family, really. You hear things like, “Home is where the heart is,” and “Home is not a place, it’s a feeling.” But home is also very much a place. It’s very much an established structure, the embodiment of lived life together as a family. You know every creak and crack, how to close the door in the summer vs. the winter, just the right angle and force to close your dishwasher. And, while home is a place that lives in your muscles, it is also, as the ready-framed wall art at HomeGoods says, where your heart is. A posture of how and where our hearts live – how we feel when we melt into our beds, our goals, aspirations, secrets, world views, etc.

So given how h o m e lives within us and us within it, our feelings of nesting run very deep. Some of the most unbearable moments in life are in liminal spaces, when we are separated from our home. Liminality is defined by Dictionary.com as the “state of transition between one stage and the next, especially between major stages in one’s life or during a rite of passage.” Where there are no answers until this other thing gets answered which largely depends on what happens with this other huge thing which won’t get settled for another few months. That liminal space is cruel because we feel so utterly unseen as we’re heaved from one unknown place to another by some uncontrollable force that has not taken the time to hear our stories. If only it knew our situation, surely it would have let us remain in our comfortable places…

Being in liminality now, I have started to pay keen attention to the boundaries of these stages with the hopes of recalibrating myself. Where do I find comfort in these situations? Where I first started? An inch from home? 800 miles away from home? Some vague place in the middle? These are really impossible questions to answer definitively, but this is one of those situations where the answers are in the process. I believe that learning and growth happen somewhere in that middle space. Sounds entirely nebulous (much like the state of my brain right now), but take heart – I don’t think we’re meant to drift in Middledom forever. Life is about moving our homes – sometimes, physical homes but mostly, internal. All of us live in liminal spaces at some point in our lives and eventually we shift and make homes there or near there. A warning from the doctor? We clean up our health practices. A job offer across the country? We pour over the decision and move our families there. We don’t stay still. We were not meant to be stagnant beings. Look at babies. They are held in safe and tight places and then they move and expand into openness. Then they explore and move some more. It’s been my observation that, instinctively, we as humans seek expansion and movement (i.e., learning and action), filling the places we exist in and finding new places to fill. We are wired to learn and grow.

Right now, I don’t feel like I’m doing anything really well. Maybe I’m learning and growing? That doesn’t seem very clear to me at this point. I have lost automaticity and capacity for the everyday things. The hard things compound the easy things, causing it all to feel messy and mediocre – I constantly feel a low-grade sense of incompetence. This isn’t ideal when you start a job where others, walking in their own liminality, are looking for guidance. However, one thing that I hope to impart is to lean into their discomfort – no hiding, no running – by seeking out community and transparency with their supervisors and with their cohort. Covid has added several obstacles to this process but I have faith in humanity’s need for relationships. My SLPD culminating project is about learning alliances between instructors and learners, and what I am reading over and over again is the importance of relationships in learning. It’s interesting how transitional times make me want to retreat from people and to pause connections with community. Instead of expanding into openness, I fold into myself until I become an impenetrable origami fortress. This is my muscle memory for learning because I have had some traumatic learning experiences. Perhaps this is what has driven me to work in the field that I do… to try to rewire pathways and carve out alternative routes in liminality, for myself, for my students, and for my clients. I mean, this is what we do, isn’t it, SLPs? Yes, we help people find their voice but we also create safe, reliable paths for our clients/patients/students to take when theirs are not working. THIS IS WHAT WE DO. And this, I’m sure, is what we need to do for ourselves as we learn and grow.