Betwixt and between
My one-year rite of passage
Earlier this year, I shared an essay about losing my coaching practice as the tech layoffs hollowed out the market I served. I wrote about how my sense of self had eroded because I mistakenly saw structural problems I couldn’t control as a personal failing.
The downturn wasn’t the temporary rough patch I hoped it would be, and I could no longer wait it out. As I said in a follow-up essay in April, you can't optimize your way out of a broken system. I couldn’t outsmart the market, so I needed to make a major change of my own.
Last fall, I began finding enough stability to get back on my feet and decide what came next within the limits I was handed.
This is where that story picks back up, along with my anthropological take on transitions, identity change, and the messy middle we’re all moving through.
My own worst critic kept me stuck
The hardest part was what this collapse did to my sense of self. I am a successful business owner, someone who had deliberately left my previous line of work for something more meaningful, and someone who always finds a way through. My inner critic delighted in berating me. “If you're so capable, why can't you fix this? What’s taking so long?” I would never say any of this to a client or friend, but I said all of it to myself, every day. If you've been through something like this, you may know that voice well.
Clinging to a business I couldn't admit was dead kept me from moving forward. I needed paying work yesterday, so I took on UX consulting jobs and revived my side cash college hustles. At first, it felt like going backwards, like proof I'd failed. But the urgency actually made it easier to see the work for what it was: a way to pay the bills and not a measure of my worth as a human (internalized capitalism can kick rocks). Money in the bank eased the pressure and bought me enough stability to stay afloat and start rebuilding.
I could finally see glimmers resurfacing of the identity that I’d been so afraid of losing, which is to say, the capable, autonomous, and determined Amy I’ve always been.
In between identities
There’s a concept in anthropology (my discipline of origin) called rites of passage, which is the move from one identity to another. Cultures build rituals and ceremonies around common transitions like birthdays, marriage, graduation, parenthood, coming of age, and death.
Work culture has its own transitional events: leaving a company, changing fields, becoming a business owner, retirement. These identity shifts change how you spend your days, how you introduce yourself, how people treat you, your social status, and your understanding of who you are.
We don't just jump from one identity to the next. There’s a messy middle of the passage called liminality, which comes from limen, the Latin word for threshold. This is when you’ve left the old identity but haven't yet landed in the new one. It doesn't always feel like a well-defined phase: parts of the old self linger, the way that leaving an organization doesn't sever the emotional connection to coworkers or to the work overnight.
Liminality can all at once feel like being lost and like grieving a version of yourself, especially when you're not sure what's coming or how to get there.
So many of us are living in the betwixt and between and considering some kind of significant change. We’re eyeing the exit at work, a year into an indefinite job search, asking who we are if not the job we were laid off from, or figuring out what to do next.
Choices within limitations
We live in a society, so no one decides anything with full autonomy. We're all weighing our options against real-world limitations. But limits aren't the same as having no choice. You just have to be as realistic as you are creative and strategic, and work within them.
Your circumstances and priorities at 45 aren't the ones you had at 25. The important thing is to anchor your decisions in the person you are today, not the one you used to be, and especially not in other people’s narratives and expectations.
Solid ground required for safe passage
During my rite of passage, I had to relearn something essential—that I couldn’t think straight until I felt stable and safe. Once I was, I made an actual plan, the first tangible result of all that processing.
I got specific about what to leave behind and what to build on, who I want to work with, and what I wanted to help them with. And I found the center where my research, coaching, and anthropology all overlap, which is the foundation of my practice moving forward.
Carrying out the rebuild by myself wasn't an option. The stakes were too high, I wanted to get it right, and I didn't have the capacity while trying to pay my bills and enjoy life somewhat. So I brought in a strategist, a writer, and a designer, and leaned on a network of small-business peers. Much of this labor is invisible, even to the people closest to me, and this group helped me feel more seen.
Every milestone built my confidence and created momentum. I trusted myself to make the right moves, and the inner critic faded away as I began to feel like my old self again.
If you're somewhere in the middle of your own passage right now, just know that you are not doing it wrong, your favorite version of you is still there, and the fog will eventually lift.
*Liminality and rites of passage are concepts developed by ethnographer Arnold van Gennep in 1909, and popularized by anthropologist Victor Turner, who first used the phrase “betwixt and between” in this context in 1967.
