Welcome to Are You Mad At Me? — a weekly newsletter about anxiety, perfectionism, addiction, self-esteem, living with unanswered texts, recovering from people-pleasing and becoming better friends with ourselves.
I’m writing to you from what I call the hallway. Not the hallway of my house, but the hallway of my life. As I’ve heard it said, “when one door opens, another closes, but it’s hell in the hallway.”
Whether I like it or not, I’m in the hallway. I have been here before and this place of in-betweenness feels weirdly familiar and Liana-esque. Which is surprising given that I usually want life to be all-or-nothing which is the complete antithesis of the hallway which is grey grey grey grey grey. In theory, I should hate it here. But when I reflect back on my life, and even my day yesterday, the in-between, the hallway, seems to be the place I spend most of my time and experience most of my growth.
Sometimes the hallway is big – like right now I am winding down a full time job and getting ready to start grad school in the fall (more on that in the coming weeks!). But sometimes the hallway is small, almost imperceptible, like the space between two feelings or the unknown of what will trigger or delight me next. I was always jealous of people who when asked “how was your day yesterday?” would respond with a simple word or phrase “it was good,” or “it was super shitty.” How was anyone’s day just one thing? I feel like I spend most of my days in the hallways between different thoughts, moods, activities, states of mind. My experience of being Liana on any given day includes a lot of different coordinates. My work over all these years has been to make the voyage less bumpy — to learn how to not get seasick as a person who feels deeply and sometimes thinks too much.
But hallways - transitions, in-between times, WTF is happening times - are uncomfortable. I feel like I have years of practice sitting in these liminal spaces, and yet they still feel like the abyss every time. I think it’s because we’re raised in a society where conviction is one of the most highly prized qualities a person can have. We revere people who know “who they are!” or who “have a plan!” or “who has their shit together!”. So what happens when you’re in the hallway and someone asks you where you are and you’re not even sure what coordinates to give them because you’re in the freaking middle? Or they ask you what’s next, and you’re not sure what pin to drop on the map that is your life because there is no GPS for being this far out at sea. If you’re talking to the wrong person, the no-BS answer of “I have no idea what I’m fucking doing or where I’m going” might be met with a blank face and a glare of pity. Ideally, you’re talking to the right person and what you hear back sounds more like “same girl. Same”
I’m here to tell you; “Same girl. Same” I am in the hallway right now and it’s scary and also simultaneously less painful than past hallways have been. Maybe it’s because I do have a destination in mind (grad school) and so the horizon looks less foreboding. Maybe it’s because I spent most of COVID in the hallway and had to learn my way around this weird AF place. Maybe it’s because I have been connecting to a higher guidance over the last year that has given me a lot of clarity about my life path, even though I still don’t know what happens next (it turns out having clarity is different than having control). So I trust the hallway a little bit more because I feel “well and carefully led” as Julia writes about in the Artist’s Way. Maybe it’s because I’ve collected a log of moments and miracles that have built my trust in the fact that Life (in that higher, universal, woo-woo sort of way) has my back and will get me to the next best thing. Maybe it’s because I am way more willing than I used to be to be uncomfortable, and I have way more tools to deal with the distress that comes up around being uncomfortable.
The in-between times, the transition times are an opportunity. An opportunity to pause and slow down. An opportunity to see that you will still be standing if you don’t know what’s happening or fully understand what’s going on. An opportunity to tend to your own addictions to productivity and to being the kind of person that “has a plan”. An opportunity to work on the ways you connect your worth to external things “going right”. An opportunity to tend to the place that isn’t even sure if you’re worth anything if nothing is happening (kind of like the ‘gram it or it didn’t happen). Most importantly, being in the hallway is an opportunity to see that while discomfort is uncomfortable, it will not kill you. So many of our unhelpful coping mechanisms in life come from believing the lie that discomfort will kill us and so we must fix it, outrun it, figure it out, eliminate it at all costs.
For a long time, I tried to convince myself that I wasn’t uncomfortable in the in-between (you know, as part of my lifelong attempt to be the “chill girl”). But I am. I am uncomfortable.
And yet, things have arisen in this chasm that did not have the space to come up before. Waves of grief about my relationship with my father, clarity about the next layers that need to be looked at in therapy. The hallway is the most tender, the most vulnerable. I have learned to consider these moments of “stuff coming up” as a gift – because so much of my life I am rushing around with something to do and someone to be that I don’t make the space for it all to be felt. I have access to material in the hallway that I don’t have access to normally. I don’t want to miss it.
Above my desk where I am currently writing this newsletter, I have post-its with reminders that I too-often forget. One says:
What would I feel right now if I knew ALL IS WELL?
What would I trust?
What would I do?
What would I stop doing?
Journal on that for a bit. Let’s just play pretend here. If I could guarantee to you that ALL IS WELL - and that all will be well – you’ll get the partner, the career, the house, the family, whatever you’re terrified won’t be on the other end of this hallway and is thus fueling your compulsion to control. If I can SWEAR to you that you will get all those good things (we don’t know when or how but you WILL get it), if you knew for a fact that were true, what would you trust right now?
Here’s my list:
I would trust that it’s okay that I’m not super into any of the guys I’ve been going on dates with. None of these guys HAVE to be the one.
I would trust that all I have to do is keep writing this newsletter and that is enough to make me a writer
I would trust that it’s okay that I feel a little less shiny walking away from a big, full-time marketing career in favor of something calling my soul.
I would trust that I am doing enough work on myself. I don’t need to be healing any faster than I am. I know it seems like I do sometimes, but I don’t actually.
My fear wants a plan to know I am going to be okay. My faith knows that I am already okay, and that whatever happens next is the plan.
I am working to let go of my need to control the timeline. To admit that I cannot control the speed or velocity of my healing, my body’s process, the weather warming up, or when the hallway will turn into that next open door.
I am working to let go of the belief that life should not be a hallway and that if I just work hard enough, I’ll get to this moment of finite completion and calm where nothing is in transition anymore (this made me LOL as I wrote it…because a part of me knows this isn’t true while another part of me reallllllly wants to believe its possible).
I am working to let go of what anyone else thinks of my hallway, my in-between time, my process, my not-shiny, kind-of-clunky, messy middle space. I do not need to make my hallway look good to other people. I am not hosting a dinner party there.
Turns out all of art is about being in the hallway lol. Which is kind of infuriating for me given that I was the girl in college who would decide what her paper’s thesis would be in advance and then go into the stacks to find research that supported her already crafted thesis. This morning I heard the line – “How to grow as an artist is to do things you don’t know how to do”
Deeply moved by
’s recent substack about being exhausted, taking naps in the middle of a Thursday and working through the shame of that.This incessant pressure to produce, and the attending shame and fear that comes when we can’t, feels like it’s erasing me—us. I don’t have any answers, but I’m staying open to the question of what’s happening and how I can begin to move through the world differently and create some lasting internal shifts so that I’m not perpetuating this toxic ideal for myself and the people around me. But also—and this is really important to me—so that I’m not conveying to you, the reader, or anyone taking in my work online or elsewhere that I’m “doing it all” with energy left to spare. I’m not! I’m tired. I see this (or what I imagine to be this) a lot on social media: a sort of performed “messiness”; a lot of talk about balance, self-care, and healthy boundaries alongside near-constant productivity. I mean, I could just be projecting (or maybe these people have enormous teams behind the scenes), but I don’t know. Either way, I don’t want to contribute to it anymore; I’m sure I have in the past.