The third way

I call it the liminal space. The space between, the almost but not quite, the both/and, where nothing is certain and everything is possible.

Liminal space (noun): relating to or situated at a threshold. an intermediate state, phase or condition. the in-between.

This morning I put in my headphones and went for a walk in an attempt to regulate my weary body. We recently arrived home, again, from days on the road, more doctors visits and test results, documentation attempting to interpret my body. I listened to a podcast by the poet Andrea Gibson, who I’ve spoken about before and is one of my favourite teachers for this season of my life. They are living with cancer, and their thoughts on death, illness, relationship and queerness have changed the quality of how I look at my own life.

And Andrea practices something I attempt to create in my own life, which is the expansive magic of pain, this way of being open to all of it. Sophie Strand asks what worlds open to us when we step into our pain, and it feels like an echo of when Glennon Doyle says to pain “Teach me what I need to know.”

I was talking to my friend later in the morning and I said, “I’m far more interested in the poetry of transplantation than I am the policies of transplantation.”

Everything is a mirror. What are we choosing to reflect?

The last little while I’ve been returning to this space of camping out in hospital waiting rooms, running the line waiting for test results, scheduling appointments and navigating medical decisions that have the potential to change everything. I’ve done this before, and while every time carries the temptation to complain about being here again I choose to think of it like Jeanette LeBlanc does when she says its like returning to the cage only to find a better way out.

Can I write myself free-er in this version of the story?

Its like when Sophie Strand talks about story like water, how we can step into a memory and influence the way we remember it. It’s like when Alice Hoffman writes about witchery and how storytelling is a form of magic over memory. I am returning to old spaces, to familiar stories, in an attempt to rewrite history.

I am weaving my own myths.

I’ve realized as I’ve paced this liminal space that I have told myself so many stories around chronic illness and pain. And as I was sitting in the guest room of my parents’ house after another doctors appointment, I wrote the myth of the third way for myself.

There’s always been this idea of healthy or sick, joy or pain, that we have to pick between one thing or another, and I’m far more interested in the alternative, the path that runs right through the middle, the liminal space, the third way. It’s where I’ve built my life.

As a friend spoke about healing her body, how thoughts influence reality and shifting mindset to cope with chronic illness, I began to realize this binary wasn’t made for me. Because healthy as it appears for any other person will never exist for me. And while to some my reality might look like sickness, that definition doesn’t fit quite right either. I exist somewhere in the middle, where doctors appointments are squished alongside work meetings and content creation sits in hospital waiting rooms. And I’m infuriated at the binaries we are presented with, at the way this line of thinking has been weaponized and used to hurt people, how it hurt me. and Andrea Gibson, when talking about queerness and the way the idea of queerness has exploded in them as they live in such an intimate relationship with death, says that this part of them is infinite, it’s everything, and words haven’t even be invented yet for how all encompassing it is.

That way of thinking is restrictive and I want to live expansive. I want to live embodied. I want to live mythic. In looking at the binaries, the options I was handed for living, not one of them takes into account the whole of me. They are always dividing up, slicing into pieces, removing parts of the story in a way that has never honoured the truth of who I am.

Pain and sickness, words like undiagnosed and incurable, they have been taught to invoke a tightening, a restriction. It means one of two things, it fits into a box, you’re either sick or you’re healed. The truth is if I’m performing wellness, I’m doing it for your benefit and not mine. The truth of me is found in the space where I’m not dead, but I’m not free of disease, but I’m not cured. My body is the manifestation of liminal space. I am the embodiment of the liminal.

I exist in the wide open plains, the third way, where the options aren’t boxes but spacious. I am writing the story from the middle. Not one of winning or losing, even though that’s what we all know and love.

One of myth and magic. Of the third way, that is rich and beautiful and deep and messy and true.