When I was a kid, I used to play a computer game that sent you to the limbo if you left your character frozen in place for too long. “The limbo” took the form of a small house floating in empty darkness. The game feature was designed to discourage players from becoming AFK, but I was instead fascinated with getting my character stuck there.
I couldn’t tell you then, but what captivated me about the limbo was its duality—it was both unsettling and comforting, haunting and nostalgic. The tendency of limbo to elicit such emotions isn’t novel, and people have long been subject to the entrapping nature of being “stuck in limbo”.
In everyday life, the limbo manifests itself as a suspended state of uncertainty that we feel unable to pass through. Take, for example, academic limbo when a student is undecided on their major, or career limbo when an individual is unable to advance in their workplace. In reality, the limbo feels a lot less fun than a house in a game; it can be frustrating, isolating, and mentally taxing.
But, there’s a flip side that often accompanies limbo: liminality. In layman’s terms, liminality refers to an in-between state of being. It is the threshold between where you’ve been and where you’re going, serving as a space to pass through but not stay.
Oftentimes when we think we are in limbo, it helps to reframe it as a liminal event. It’s not that we’re stuck, but rather that we’re transitioning. The switch from limbo to liminal encourages us to see the possibilities in a situation and do the self-reflection necessary to take action.
In many ways, college can be likened to a limbo/liminal experience. As the midway point between teenage and adult years, it is riddled with both uncertainty and opportunity.
Moments of transition hold great insight, which is why I think lots of people say they find themselves in college. It is a liminal place of exploration, and by exposing the space between two things, it offers a look into the underlying, unchanging essence in between.
I’m graduating in a few months and it feels strange, exciting yet disconcerting, to be standing at the precipice of something wholly different from the last four years. I’ve made good use of college as a liminal event and, unlike my ten-year-old self, I have no desire to get stuck in a limbo house. So, I’m eager to leave this liminal period of my life and see what the future holds!