The Long Path Through the Liminal
My Five-Year Journey of Not Having It Figured Out
Before we jump in: I’m putting together a small group of people for something I’ve been thinking about for a while—a kind of digital village for people who are in some kind of transition, shift, or reimagining phase.
Right now, I’m imagining how it could work—but honestly, the only way to figure out what actually does work is to build it with people.
So this first phase is more of an experiment than a finished thing. An Adventure.
The idea is to shape it together—see what helps, what doesn’t, stay curious, open and keep tinkering, until some structure emerges.
One part inner landscape and often necessary mindset shifts - one part running various life experiments.
If that sounds interesting, DM me know and I’ll share more.
I wanted to talk about how I ended up in this particular mental space. It's been quite a journey, and I have to say upfront: I feel like our culture has pathologized liminal spaces and messy middles. We've made the times when we don't quite know, don't have everything figured out, into something that makes everyone uncomfortable.
The world expects polished bios and having it all together—if not now, then at least by next Tuesday.
My story is like many stories, nothing special here. At some point, I started feeling that whatever I'd been doing for years wasn't quite aligned with what I wanted to do. On some level, it just stopped working. So I started exploring what was next for Anna.
I had a pretty comfortable situation—working for myself, lots of so-called free time (it wasn't really free, but I had headspace to tinker with ideas). I thought it would be a matter of maybe months. Once I really sat down and started thinking, it would go from there.
Nothing went according to plan. And when I think about it - everything has.
Looking back, I think even making plans for something like this stage is kind of silly. I don't mean stop making plans—plans are still good, setting goals is still good. It's just that we need to understand what's even possible to become a goal, and what isn't.
It's been almost five years now since I started this journey. A lot has happened in the meantime, and it's only now that I'm getting more clarity on things. I know that everything that happened along the way was a necessary step to get me where I am. But it often means doing a very different type of work.
By no means do I have things figured out, but this is probably the first time I feel like I have a decent sense of direction.
The Loneliness of Not Knowing
This space—being in this liminal space, this time of transition, of not knowing, of trying to figure out and not being able to—is often a very lonely place.
For many years, I was trying to read more books, take more courses, get different certifications. I was doing my part, and yet nothing was really coming together.
Everything would add something to the picture, but sometimes it was the opposite - it would obliterate the previous plan, and I was back to square one.
You think you have things figured out, and something wipes it. It can be an internal shift, or it can be external reality shifting. Politics, AI - or something else happens.
Originally, I started with the puzzle of why I couldn't do what I wanted to do. I had projects I couldn't follow through on.
How come I start things and never really finish them?
I read tons of books on procrastination, went into research papers on goal setting, motivation, attention, neuroscience. I figured maybe it was distraction, so I did a 10-month intensive course on “digital wellbeing”. We learned about evolutionary underpinnings, the mismatch between us and the world of technology, attention economy. Eye-opening on many levels, but I always felt something was missing.
So I went straight into something that seemed like the opposite—the neuroscience of change - and from tech to embodiment.
I was trying to pin down what's happening within us that things just aren't happening, even though we want them, even though we're seemingly trying.
A lot of us smart people who are interested, willing to do the work, consuming content, always in exploratory mode—and yet not much really happens. Why is this not happening? What is preventing this whole change?
Going Slower, To Get There Faster
I've been journaling and searching for well over 30 years. I've done all the possible tests—personality tests, values assessments. and yes, some Ikigai charts.
On paper - everything was there. It just somehow didn't translate into anything in my life.
So I decided that instead of going faster, maybe I should go slower. Instead of reading more books, I started talking to more people.
That was a breakthrough for me on many levels because it obliterated the vision that everyone around me has it figured out. It's just that people usually don't talk about it, at least not in a very open and honest way.
There were many people who were utterly lost, even though on the outside they looked like they had everything figured out—fancy bios, good profile pictures, decent Substacks or launched offers. I was like, what's wrong with me?
When we started talking openly and honestly about what's happening and just how hard this stage is, that was a game changer in how I started approaching things.
Understanding How Change Actually Works
I started noticing more and more of this, and it led me to understanding how we function, how we don't, what the prerequisites for change are, and how to make it easier.
For as long as I remember, I wanted to have a space that was just honest and where people would support each other. I'm not against more performative stuff; it's just that I know it doesn't work.
I understood that information does not equal transformation. In fact, sometimes it gets in the way. I see a lot of people who I call endearingly "smart but stuck."
Human change doesn't happen like we want to think it happens.
Transformation, deeper shifts, and reinvention don't happen because you buy a new planner or journal intensely for two days. It almost always takes much longer than we expect and is way messier than we'd like it to be.
That's a feature, not a bug. I think it's there for a reason. But if you don't see it that way, if you don't see it as part of the process, you're not able to trust the process because you don't even see that there is a process. All you see is a mess.
We can only really connect the dots looking back. But while you're in the middle, in the thick of it, you're just utterly lost. It's very disorienting.
The Pressure Trap
As I was playing with things in my life, I started noticing that the more pressure I put on myself, the harder things were. The more pressure I created, the more stuck I was.
This is a stage when a lot of us are constantly announcing things, launching products, starting different endeavors, only to go quiet because things don't resonate with others. Sometimes they don't even resonate with us, even though we've created them. I've been there many times.
We usually show up in the world when we feel energized and have it figured out for now, then we go quiet again. We go into invisibility mode; we stop publishing and announcing things. A lot of us are quietly hurting, feeling like failures because our ideas seem good on paper but never gain traction.
There's confusion, thinking and rethinking, wondering if we even want to do it. Sometimes there's regret—you went on a journey, set yourself on a new path, maybe left something behind. Now you're having second thoughts. Doubts creep in, maybe your runway is getting shorter because you're running out of time or funds.
If things take a while, as they usually do, you might start thinking: Will it ever happen? Maybe this is as good as it gets. Maybe I'll never find my thing, a new container for myself. Maybe I'll be 'homeless' for the rest of my life.
This is uncomfortable on many levels. It's fine to be in that space in your teenage years or early adulthood, but not so much when you're middle-aged and lost. Then -according to the societal plan - you just become a loser.
The Shift
There was a point when I had enough of all the self-development, good advice, and productivity. It wasn't resonating with me. I was giving advice I didn't want to take, and I had an internal misalignment. I knew I could produce products that would probably make money, but I knew inside that they wouldn't work. People would buy them, but they wouldn't work for anyone.
I stopped consuming content focused on optimization and naturally started gravitating toward very different things. I started rereading books I'd read as a teenager—humanistic psychology, philosophical books, psychological books from the era that was pre-optimization, pre-hustle culture. It was more about what humans are about. We cannot download a program. We cannot simply get a new operating system into our heads; it's not how we work.
I discovered Joseph Campbell and the hero's journey, myths, the power of stories.
I leaned into narrative coaching and more embodied approaches.
And THAT is deeply human.
For many years, it was all about my head. I could meditate with an app and consider myself spiritual in the sense that I was introspective. But it wasn't easy to give up that kind of thinking, to embrace this more natural state because it was unnerving. It wasn't clear; there was no scaffolding.
All of a sudden, it wasn't about setting goals better but about trusting myself, leaning into things, embracing the not knowing, and other uncomfortable things. Leaning into discomfort instead of trying to eradicate it.
That's when things started to change.
The Art of Stopping
Funny enough, it wasn't so much about starting things. Yes, I've started a lot of things, but in many cases, it was more about stopping things.
Navigating this liminal space is just as much about learning as it is about unlearning. One of the hardest parts is unlearning things.
Now I see human change and the whole transformation process in a very different way. First of all, it's totally natural. A lot of what we're experiencing is natural and necessary, and it's there for a reason—but our world doesn't like it. Our CVs don't like it. It's this shameful, humbling thing we're trying to tuck away and never really talk about.
Since we're not technology, not computers that can just upload and download stuff, change our software—it's different. It's around stories, it's about beliefs, and our hardware (our mental bandwidth, attention, biology) is very different. We have different needs. We're more like creating a garden than furnishing an apartment.
Don’t Go Alone
It's so much easier and so much more fun when we do it with other people because then it's not a problem—it's an adventure, it's a journey.
Any good adventure needs good company. We swap stories, and all of a sudden, it turns out we're not that different even though our stories are wildly different.
Usually, we try to rush the whole process to just get there and be over with it and resume our normal state of knowing what the hell we're trying to do. I've noticed that the more we rush it, the longer it takes.
But when we see it as part of being human, when we have good company along the way, when we stop pathologizing the mess and start seeing it as the garden we're tending—that changes everything.
This phase, this transition, will often take longer and be harder than we expect—in different ways for each of us. It will stretch us, it will humble us, but if we do it "right," it will also make us grow a lot. Not without some growing pains, though.
The path is long, and it's supposed to be. The liminal space isn't a problem to solve; it's a place to inhabit with grace, curiosity, and good company.