In the Liminal
a diaristic vent about prestigious universities, fumbled futures, and feeling like an overall disappointment
I wake to the simmering heat of my island sun on a Tuesday morning and stare at the faded posters taped to my door. Some have been up since middle school, others since high school, and all have remained equally untouched in at least the past four years. If were to get up now, I’d walk to the kitchen and find my mother is gone but has kindly left behind coffee in a thermos as she always did when I was still in school. Not because I can’t make it myself, but because a decade ago I once told her it tasted better when she made it (it’s true) and the habit of it probably reminds her of when I was a smart, overachieving teenager with a bright future ahead of me.
But the dread sinks in as I think, I’m still here, in this room, in this house, in this hometown, so I sleep and let the coffee get lukewarm for another hour or two or three because it doesn’t matter. I’m not doing anything, anyway.
A microcosm of my schoolgirl years rests buried deep in my closet. Awards, ribbons, medals, trophies, and certificates of recognition at the local and national level are neatly tucked away in these boxes, mostly forgotten and destined to collect dust for the rest of their symbolic existence.
I was the goddamn poster child of academic excellence. Had you asked any of my teachers, they would have assured you I was “going places”—that I was going to be the first neurosurgeon-space engineer-author-president-mathematician or… something like that, depending on who you asked.
By the end of my junior year of high school, I was set on one goal and one goal alone: to leave. At the time, I didn’t care about impressing anyone or proving to others how “smart” and “gifted” I was. I wanted to escape.
My mother had made it clear that the only circumstances under which I was allowed to leave the island were if I somehow managed to be accepted into a prestigious university with a sizable scholarship. Conditional as her support was, my conviction that this was the only way out was so strong that I somehow went and did just that.
(In hindsight, I can’t quite remember what exactly it was I wanted to run from. Was it my hometown? My peers? My overbearing mother? Did I want to reinvent myself? Was I chasing a vague idea of greatness? I’m really not sure. But I often dwell on whether it would have really been so bad if had I stayed behind, and know the answer is probably the one I don’t like.)
Prestigious universities are the great equalizer of high-school overachievers who were unanimously praised as the greatest damn thing to walk this planet. When you put the global top whatever-percent of senior students in the same place, the vast majority will inevitably rank somewhere among the new average.
I’d like to believe I had a good amount of grounding before this happened to me. While I had no shortage of teachers who looked at me with stars in their eyes, my mother never failed to follow up every A+ on my report card with a near-sadistic reminder that there were many people far more intelligent, far more accomplished than me just around the corner. In spite of all the priming for my terrifying, but certain, fate of mediocrity, I admit it still stung to know all the nights spent studying and working my mind and body to physical limits sometimes only paid off as a just-passing grade.
Career advisors at my university were possibly the only thing keeping me sane in the whole ordeal. Simply graduating from such a university, according to them, opened a plethora of doors that would otherwise be closed. This much I believed when I began college, and when I began to doubt the verity of those words, I looked to statistics to reaffirm my faith. Approximately 99% of students graduated from my university with a job offer, graduate school acceptance, or some other concrete plan for the rest of their careers. I thought of these numbers over and over to myself in particularly desperate moments, in between rejection emails and vitriolic texts from my mother and Padre nuestro’s and assorted pleads to God and the universe as if this, too, was its own kind of prayer, and repeating it enough times would make a miracle happen.
And now I’ve graduated college, without job prospects or an acceptance to graduate school and much less some kind of concrete plan for my life. After all has been said and done, I ended up in the unlikely 1% who have absolutely no idea what they’re doing and are still defeatedly trying to figure it out.
I’m headed back to living at my mother’s house in my suffocatingly tight-knit hometown with my head hung low, tail between my legs. It’s a peculiar kind of shame to have to look at all the people who so fervently believed in me so many years ago and have to say, Remember all that potential I had so many years ago? Yeah, it’s wasted.
Perhaps I am being a little narcissistic here. I don’t mean to exaggerate my importance as if I was ever regarded as some sort of Messiah to anyone. Truthfully, I believe that, to most people I grew up with, I am no more than a distant memory of the token neurotic girl in class with good grades.
But whatever the public perception of my life (or lack thereof) may be, the fear of being a proven failure, a certified disappointment, has still rooted itself deep in my bones.
I can’t help but bitterly seethe when I bump into a former teacher or an old friend’s parents at my local grocery store and they let me know so-and-so’s gone and started law school or med school or a PhD or working for their dream company or married and had 3 kids and what have you been up to? followed by a disillusioned oh, a flash of pity, and a hurried well, I’m sure you’ll figure it out, when all I wanted was to buy some fucking onions and go.
Where do I even go from here?
I’m not in college anymore. I’ve outgrown short-term internships. I’ve applied to grad schools as a last ditch effort, but I won’t be conclusively hearing back from most in the next several months. Even as I submit my CV to dubiously creditable employers on just about every hiring website known to man, I wonder—who would hire a candidate who might quit to pursue higher education in the next 6 months? How unethical is it to lie about it? (And is it a tolerable degree of unethical, all things considered?) Am I even qualified enough for any of these jobs? Is my degree—prestigious or otherwise—worth anything at all in the Real World?
Stagnant as I am right now, am I worth anything at all?
A few weeks ago, I turned 22, and everything got a little worse.
I’m coming to terms with being officially “in my twenties.” As my mother never fails to remind me, this is the most formative era of my career, and any critical mistakes will haunt me for the rest of my life.
Being 22-24 is weird. At 21, it’s okay to still be unsure of the future, and at 25 you should be looking into buying property, moving up in the corporate ladder, and family planning. Whatever happens in between is anyone’s guess. But I am not only in this confusing, second adolescence (one with more bills and creepy men), I’ve slipped between the cracks of young adulthood into a liminal space wedged somewhere in the middle of “bright future ahead” and “wasted potential”.
It’s all liminal.
I have trouble thinking of the future without spiraling into a pessimistic sinkhole right now.1 With that said, however, I still want to end on a positive note—jarring tonal shift be damned.
Though it’s not always clear to see, there is comfort in knowing this liminal space is not truly as lonely as it feels. There is liminality everywhere for those keen enough to notice, and as much as we are told otherwise, it is inevitable we all land here sooner or later, at one point in time or many, many others. And as much as the entirety of this essay may suggest otherwise, I do not believe misery and shame are inextricably intertwined with uncertainty.
Quantum physics, at its core, tells us everything is made up of infinitesimal particles which are defined by an inherent degree of uncertainty—you cannot know for certain more than single thing about a particle at once. So if our entire universe is built on uncertainty, then it can’t be so bad if, momentarily, we embody our own, too.2
I propose we formulate better questions as a first step in the right direction. How do you find joy and hope in liminality? Is it by building community people who are like you? Is it by reconnecting with the people and things you love? Is it by embracing the mundanity of just existing quietly and still for a little bit? (Or by screaming into the void of Substack to empty out years of pent-up rage?)
I don’t have the answers, but I guess it’s more about the mental journey to them, anyway.
Returning to old hobbies and picking up new ones are perhaps the only silver linings I have identified so far, and it is here where I will begin directing my efforts on finding meaning and enjoyment in this languorous stage of my life. There’s some insightful commentary about labor and value and productivity and late-stage capitalism in there if you look hard enough.
I hope to someday revisit this topic with a clear mind and contentment in my heart, wearing the knowing smile of someone for whom everything did, in fact, work out in the end. I’m not quite there yet, but one can hope.
In the meantime, we have to convince ourselves that ultimately, somehow, we are greater than the sum of our parts, that everything will eventually be okay, that we have inherent worth right here in the liminal—if for no other reason than simply because we can’t rely on others to do it for us anymore.
With love,
Marce <3
I will note that having a soft place to land in between the cracks, all things considered, is not the worst thing that could happen to a person. Do not let the frustration and anger of the present blind us of the privilege we have to be in it at all.
This is a botched interpretation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which has nothing to do with boxes and dubiously dead cats—but it makes for a nice metaphor, doesn’t it?