Spoiler alert: life isn’t point A to B, and there’s no “next chapter” coming
You’re already living the thing you think is coming later
If life isn’t point A to point B, & there is no next chapter, then what we’ve been calling “in between” might not be in between at all.
That’s where liminal spaces have been sitting with me lately.
Blame it on the soon-to-premiere film Backrooms, or maybe my short film void. The reason doesn’t really matter. What does is how life has been feeling… like a series of hallways, stairways, & corridors.
A series of transitional, “in-between” spaces that, for me, historically felt like an interlude between point A & B, then point B & C, & so on.
You enter one hallway, exit for a brief pause, & then head into the next. That’s how I used to understand life. Like a string of temporary spaces you move through on your way to somewhere more defined, more stable, & ultimately, more final.
We trade one for another, these spaces full of uncertainty, instability, & a varying degree of anxiety. Through each cycle, you hopefully learn something, expand a little, grow a little, & gather what you need for whatever comes next. And all of those cycles, stacked together, become the course of your life.
Earlier, I said “historically felt” because my belief system has changed.
It’s a slight differentiation, but it has created a much larger ripple effect than I expected. I don’t really believe in point A or point B in the same way anymore. Life has never & will never be that clean or cut & dry. What feels more resonant now is that we assign arbitrary points along the journey.
Tony’s Timeline, As Understood by Tony
Let’s say your name is Tony.
Who you are, what you do, your interests, none of that matter. We meet you at Point L of your life. Not the beginning, not the end, just somewhere in the middle. Like most people, meaning has been assigned to the points that came before this. Some of that meaning came from you, some of it was handed to you by family, by society, by the institutions you moved through along the way.
Point A might have been your birth. Point B could’ve been learning how to walk. For the sake of this example, those early points don’t really matter.
What does matter are the ones that come after.
Point M for you might be marrying your high school sweetheart.
Point N might be renovating your basement, landing a promotion, or buying a home
Point O might be having a kid.
We create these markers & use them to make sense of where we are. They help us feel like we’re moving forward & like we’re on track. It gives us a sense of order.
But the thing about these points is… they don’t always work out the way we imagined.
Sometimes the marriage doesn’t happen. Or it does, & it ends. Sometimes the promotion falls through. The house doesn’t come. Sometimes the timeline shifts. And sometimes the things you thought would define your life either never arrive or arrive & feel different than you expected.
When that happens, it can feel like you’ve missed something. Like your life isn’t unfolding the way it’s supposed to. But maybe the issue isn’t you (or us).
Maybe it’s the way we’ve been taught to define the journey in the first place.
Because if the points are unstable, shifting, or entirely out of your control… then maybe they were never meant to carry that much weight to begin with.
When you start to see that, something begins to loosen.
Because when you remove all of those points, when you stop defining your life by where you’ve “arrived,” what you’re left with is one long, tenuous journey through uncertainty & the unknown. That is life, full of its ups & downs, its moments of clarity & confusion, joy & sorrow, its seasons of expansion & contraction.
And once you remove all of the points, something very important becomes crystal clear: you are not in between life.
You are in it. Right now.
In the hallway, in all of that uncertainty, & in all that is unknown, that is not an interlude before the “real” part begins whether it be Point D or Point L. This is the real part. However mundane or exciting, however momentous or ordinary.
I share that because I know how easy it is to treat your current season like a placeholder. Like you’re just passing through until something more solid arrives. A familiar feeling, right?
But maybe seasons of ‘liminality’ deserve a little more reverence than that.
A small update regarding Take What You Need
To those of you who were expecting a TWYN letter this week, my apologies. I’ve felt a pressure to keep a consistent cadence with that work, but the truth is, the letters don’t really come from a schedule.
They come from lived experience & organic moments that sit with me long enough to take shape. And I don’t want to force that process just to say I showed up on time :)
So for now, I’ll continue sharing thoughts like this when they feel honest, & the letters will return when they’re ready.
If you’re new here, Take What You Need is a project I started over a year ago as a physical installation that appeared in public spaces. The letters from that installation now live digitally here on my Substack.
If you’d like to experience it in person, I’ll be sharing it at a few upcoming events:
stART the Conversation Art Exhibition — Thursday, May 7, 2026 | 4–8 PM
Mental Health KC Conference — Thursday, May 28, 2026 | 1:45–2:45 PM
— Kasim