Neither here nor there: Welcome to liminality

UCCS wasn't my first choice. I had applied to – and been accepted by – a faraway university where I pictured in vivid and self-indulgent detail the next chapter of my life.

But one thing led to another, and circumstances compounded so that I remained here, in the city of my birth, and attended UCCS.

I remember being a freshman. I remember, silly as it sounds now, being afraid that I would miss high school – that somehow the Brave New World of college would defeat me. I was nervous, but I was also determined. If I was going to live at home and attend the college that had been just down the road my whole life, the college from which both of my parents obtained degrees, then I was going to make it the best damn experience I could. I was going to own that campus.

So when I walked into the first day of freshman seminar – "Unreality," it was aptly dubbed – I sat down next to the scariest-looking person there. She was all Goth and metal, with piercings and a no-nonsense attitude to match. Her name was Kristen, and she is today someone on whom I know I can rely, however hairy the situation may become. She'd help me dispose of a body if I asked her to – not that I've ever expressed that particular need.

Kristen wasn't the only dear wonder to emerge from my first day at UCCS. The instructor of my freshman seminar, Laura Eurich, told me almost immediately that I should apply at The Scribe. So I did, and three years of learning and laughing and languishing later, here I am, Editor-in-Chief, faced with a year of grand potential.

As I reflect on all the time I've spent at UCCS, I am struck by two overarching motifs. The first is the extent to which I've grown and changed since high school, and the other is the disproportionately large number of truly remarkable people that seem drawn to this place. I've had professors that have changed my life and inspired me and taught me more than I believed could exist; I've encountered staff who amaze me relentlessly; and I've made friends whose worth and rarity rival the riches of a kingdom. With the people I know here, I've shared enough to fill volumes, encompassing what I think must be the entirety of the human emotional spectrum, and I can't express the enduring joy I receive from everything I've gained at UCCS.

But despite the distance between then and now, I remember being a freshman. I remember the ambiguity, the uncertainty, the sometimes-downright panic that colored the months between high school and college.

At some point in a lecture otherwise lost to me, I learned the word for those feelings: Liminality. It's a term used mostly in anthropological contexts, but there's no concept more appropriate to the world of the incoming freshman. Liminality (from the Latin, "līmen," meaning ,"threshold") occurs in times of transition, when people bid farewell to one group or thing in favor of progressing to another, but are not, for a moment at least, actually part of either.

Wikipedia.com (which, incidentally, you should stop using immediately in any sort of professional capacity) defines it thus: "The liminal state is characterized by ambiguity, openness and indeterminacy. One's sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation. Liminality is a period of transition where normal limits to thought, self-understanding, and behavior are relaxed – a situation which can lead to new perspectives. The result is a unique perspective on what has come before, and what may come next."

Liminal experiences are rare, but necessary to provide a marked sense of progression in our lives. They are by nature limited and often possessed of certain brevity, but they are times that help to define us. While we are neither what we were nor what we will be, we have a chance to decide who we are.

Welcome to liminality, you young men and women who will one day call UCCS "alma mater." Welcome to the chance to become everything you ever wanted to be, to grow and change and struggle and thrive and smile and cry and live. This is your threshold. Cross it bravely.