Hanging out in weird liminal spaces
The Hanged Man – 15.01.23
Image description: a hand holds Pamela Colman-Smith’s The Hanged Man tarot card from the Rider-Waite Tarot shows a person suspended from a T-shaped cross made of still living wood. They are hanging upside-down, viewing the world from a completely different perspective, and their facial expression is calm and serene, suggesting that they are in this hanging position either by choice or acceptance.
We all have moments of uncertainty, when we're waiting for something to happen or trying to figure out what we want. But what if we could learn to be in the present and embrace the process? This is exactly what the Hanged Man card in tarot represents - the opportunity to reflect on our rigid perspectives and take a step back to observe the world and our place in it.
I'm currently in a wonderful little home in south London, where my friends have asked me to care for their cat. I've got the music on, a new episode of Critical Role, and I'm watching Bingo curl up for a nap beside me. It may seem peaceful, but this little moment of peace punctuates a week of big changes.
I recently got back on medications that help me cope with the more difficult aspects of ADHD. Being deeply aware of my body is new for me, and has been a difficult, but rewarding process (more on that later in the post). I feel like I’m between a lot of things right now. As I reflected on my recent experiences, I realised that they related to the Hanged Man card which I pulled for this week.
Weird liminal spaces
Recently, I had a conversation with a friend about relationships, and they mentioned the concept of "hanging out in a weird liminal space." That phrase stuck with me all week. When I drew this week’s tarot card, I knew it was a topic worth exploring further.
Being between things is hard.
In last week’s card, The Star, I talked about how hope means making space. You can read the whole post and come back if you want to. I wanted to build on that because I think for so many of us, this is very difficult to do in practice. When I pulled this card, it felt like a good opportunity to do that.
New perspective, unfortunately requires letting go of old perspective. It means confrontation with unpleasant truths, and difficult things. It can also mean joyful realisations that surprise and shock us.
One of the ways
talks about this in her book Tarot for Change is the difference between being willful and being willing. Opening up takes work, and we don’t all start in the same place. Some of us have traumas and anxieties that cause us to struggle to find ourselves willing.In the legend of Odin, in exchange for wisdom, he sacrifices his eye in a well, does a sort of ritual self-sacrifice on his spear and then hangs himself in the world-tree Yggdrasil for 9 days and nights in order to gain knowledge of how the worlds work (Norse myths are based on multiple worlds). Echoing that world tree, the figure in this card is hanging from a living wood, with blossoms, signifying connection with a higher power, or some divine wisdom.
Transformation, this legend and many others, tell us, is not easy. We have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable in order to achieve new things and gain new perspective. There’s a wisdom in stillness by choice. Joseph Campbell, wrote “Not all who hesitate are lost. The psyche has many secrets in reserve. And these are not disclosed unless required.”
How are you making space to find out what you require?
When our needs find us
When I first started to come to grips with gender again, I thought it would destroy me. I’d been numb for years and realised that my depression was impact my relationships, my marriage, and my ability to live. In times before I’d been able to shield myself from the uncomfortable bits of my body and gender by keeping a 60+ hour workweek, or playing video games until I passed out on the couch. I was a person deeply avoiding themselves.
I started taking anti-depressants in the fall of 2019, everyone in my life was suffering because of how miserable I was. I remember clearly there was a morning I was walking to the office and the fog of depression was lifting. I noticed the sunlight on my skin, the birds singing, the fresh feeling of a weight lifted. I was alive. I could feel my body, my senses, fully.
And then I started to panic. My body went cold, I was tense, my heart was beating and I felt a sudden rush of adrenaline. My morning of joy turned into an overwhelmingly loud and lonely place. The depression fog was lifted, but there was another beast wandering the fog, trying to find me. That beast was this ancient foe to me, a monster I had named and met before: Not wanting to be in this body. Just over a year into my marriage, I realised I wasn’t a man and never would be. I shut down this deep yearning, this moment of clarity, and pretended nothing happened.
I spent the next few weeks trying to find some connection between antidepressants and gender. I was hoping I could find anything that might suggest gender dysphoria was something that could be a medical side effect of the drugs I was on. When I didn’t see that, I quit, cold-turkey (WARNING: do not do this, it was miserable and I almost died.)
I had decided that there was too much at stake to risk. I tried to shut down those needs as impulses, fancies, delusions. I thought that I could control my world by ignoring those hungers. At the time it was a messy soup, and a lot of clarity about this has come in the years of processing and therapy since. In the time since that moment, I’ve been working on learning to listen to soul-hunger.
The soul-changing magic of opening up
I spent a long time, most of my life ignoring my needs, so eventually, they had to come find me and ask me to open up. As I thought about making space in my life, from last week’s card, it felt like a good time to talk about some of the how of opening up and making space.
Opening up often requires being comfortable with ambiguity. Every journey has a moment of challenge that transforms our perspectives. If The Fool tarot card is about taking that first step on a new journey, The Hanged Man is about being transformed by what you find along the way.
Showing up for the process of change isn’t easy, but I think that’s what this card is getting at. That quiet and serene smirk helps us remember that when you turn things upside down you might find things that can surprise and maybe even bring joy into your life as you change. It's not about being perfect, it's about being willing to grow and evolve.
If we turn to modern therapy practices, we can see that being willing, like being hopeful is something we can develop. ACT and other therapies are starting to focus on will and behaviour more. As we gain new insights into the ways our bodies and minds are connected new and old thinking start to converse and sometimes converge.
There are practical steps we can take to grow our ability to accept things and be curious about them. For me and gender, it took going to see a psychiatrist to try a new medication, and asking about gender. It took a willingness to linger with that pain and discomfort and risk to find my way.
My soul has gone through a process of healing that’s hard to describe, but I’m not at all the person I used to be.
Hanging out as spiritual practice
During this really deep conversation with that friend and another thing that came up was how we’re processing pain right now. They said they’re trying to be in process and in the present. My friend was holding a willingness to deal with and accept the pain they were feeling, while also making space to try new things.
They acknowledged being between things; not here or there, but somewhere in the middle. As cheesy as it might sound, one of the things that got me through the first month of my separation from my ex was the song In the Middle, by Jimmy Eat World. I put it on while writing this post, and it made me feel happy about the ways I’ve grown since that very dark time. It took work to learn to just sit with things and let them be broken for a bit.
Accepting things is a practice, something that takes work. Knowing that things are in a transition state is hard. In a world driven by logic, one of the best and most beautiful things we can remember is that not everything is reducible to facts and figures and tangible data.
You don’t always have to know exactly where you’re headed. I think our modern world has taught us to desire turn-by-turn directions to enlightenment, or inner peace. It’s silly when you see it written like that, but it’s certainly how I’ve lived at times. Growth isn’t linear, and there’s no step-by-step instructions.
Growth by willingness
Sometimes the best way to do the work of growth is to let it happen. Every farmer has to let their seeds germinate and grow, and no amount of will or wishing or sunlight, or fertiliser will accelerate the process faster than is natural. Humans are cultivators, and our first field is ourselves.
I was raised in the Christian spiritual tradition. And one of the things about Christian spiritual practice is learned dependence. Being in a place where you wait is part of the core of that mystical tradition. Liminality can be a spiritual practice, if you show up mindfully to it. Being between things can be an opportunity to find out where our soul-hungers are.
We can’t force our growth, but we can create the conditions for it to happen, including being willing to just sit with things. We can have conversations that open up space for new possibilities. We can be willing to feel and accept our pains, while also being deeply curious about what new things we may discover on the other side.
Growth is a process that requires us to trust in something greater than ourselves, even if we don’t know what that is yet. It’s a journey of discovery and exploration, one that ultimately leads us back to who we were always meant to be. So if you’re hanging out between things right now, consider an invitation to see what you can see. You might surprise yourself with how much work it is to be willing to embrace some new perspective.
My name is Elle. Thank you for reading Season of the Dawning. I hope you’re enjoying my work. If you are, it would mean a lot to me if you’d share this post with two friends. It tells me this work is helping more than myself, and it gives me an opportunity to see what’s resonating with people.