Something Waiting in the Field
Yesterday I rewatched the first episode of a show I love — Tales From the Loop.
It led me back to the work of Simon Stålenhag, whose images have always felt less like science fiction and more like memory rendered sideways.
In the episode, a young girl loses her mother through a strange temporal rupture — and is later found by her adult self. The story isn’t about fixing the past. It’s about witnessing it. About becoming the version of yourself who can finally sit beside the moment that once felt unbearable.
That image stayed with me because it mirrors an experience I recognize deeply: the adult self continually returning to what the younger self needed, not to change the story, but to understand it differently. To stand at the threshold between who you were and who you’re becoming — and to stand there long enough for something real to emerge. Ultimately, what’s found is a truth that exists across timelines.
I’ve been thinking about what we’ve been calling threshold syndrome — that dissonant, often uncomfortable space after a chapter has ended but before the next one has cohered. It’s marked by stillness, self-doubt, reflection, and a strange looping back through memory. Not regression. Integration.
I’ve lived many iterations of this space: personal, professional, psychological. It isn’t unique to me. But I’ve learned that my ability to name this tension — and to stay with it — is a calling in itself. Bearing witness to liminal spaces of grief, memory, and hope, and creating containers sturdy enough to hold them, is the purpose that found me.
This is the terrain of the work that matters most to me.
To meet people in the in-between.
To witness without rushing resolution.
To help make sense of what the pause is asking for.
Transformation arrives quietly. We often realize it was standing beside us all along. Through return, recognition, and imagination, we become capable of holding what once felt too heavy — of containing the multitudes that were once too much to bear.
That’s the threshold.
And for me, it’s where meaning lives.
