The Spaces In-Between
A small serialization from my memoir, Side Effects May Include, Part 1
Part of the reason I started this newsletter was to initiate a conversation about the research I have conducted over the past many years and written about in my forthcoming memoir, Side Effects May Include (SEMI).
Today, I’m launching this space with something I’ve never done before: sharing the opening chapter of my memoir, little piece by little piece. Over the next six weeks, I’ll be serializing this chapter, not so much as a tease, but again, more as an invitation to you to explore one of the main themes of my book. We’re taught to fear gray spaces, those places in-between where things are undefined, unfinished, uncategorizable. Where we are not broken and we are not healed. We are neither who we were or who we’re becoming.
Today’s piece opens on a precipice, literally. I’m standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon in February 2024, two feet of snow-covered ground on either side of me before the earth drops away. My ankles are inflexible because my tendons have hardened, my hands are still weak, and my body is barely a year into recovery from an autoimmune condition that nearly destroyed me.
I thought this trip would be my victory lap. I was wrong.
But I was also right about something more important: that the spaces between destinations, between diagnosis and cure, between breakdown and breakthrough, are where the most profound transformations happen.
If you’re living in an in-between space right now, this is for you. (Audio of me reading the piece above!)
It is silent, still. I follow Laura across the picnic grounds. Thick white snow blankets the sides of metal tables sheltered under a forest green awning. I sense the hollowness of the landscape, like a distant void. It’s nearly too quiet, too expectant. Laura walks ahead of me, closer to the canyon’s depths. If there is a trail, it’s hidden beneath the snow. My feet feel the unevenness of the ground. Rocks and dips, edges softened by untouched white, draped over sheaths of ice. Each step is a possible slip or twist; my inflexible ankles are volatile and lack the agility I once had. It’s a treacherous traverse along the outcrop. I move slowly, regulating where I place my feet so that they are secured in divots or non-icy ground before committing to a full step. My fingertips numb, I brush them along a boulder’s edges and grasp at twigs of dead bushes, trying to feel a little more anchored to the icy cliff. Pausing in my careful progress, I look up. From where I stand, two feet of land extends on either side of me before dropping into the deep, expansive crevice. The Grand Canyon. Ancient layering dating millions of years, carved by the distant Colorado River far below. The power of water, always constant, always surprising. An accumulation of flow that exposes the past for the present. Friction over time. Worn and revealed.
My body still feels new to me, freshly exposed layers are settling into their places. Recovery, I know, is a process that remains underway. But I’m better than before and I’m celebrating my strength and resolve here in the Grand Canyon with my friend, Laura. Today I am a world apart from where I was even six months ago. This moment is my comeback. This trip honors the culminating impact of a changed mindset and intention, from believing that I would be in pain and sick forever to believing that I am in recovery, that anything is possible, and that my sense of self, more than ever before, is becoming revealed.
I make it to the distant edge and sit on a rock, grateful for my weight and the additional contact with the ground. The wind picks up and snow begins falling again, the sun’s light shifts, transforming the canyon vistas from red to blue, from clear and precise to soft and distant, to a place that floats between the carved sediments and the steel gray clouds above. I sit breathless at the morphing beauty, taking quick glances at Laura to see how she’s absorbing it all. Stillness turns into bracing against the blustering wind. I secure my hat further on my head and flip my jacket hood up to protect myself from the biting cold. The wind is so strong that it pushes my body forward and back. Be present, I tell myself. Pay attention. Just be here because this is happening right now. The snowfall. The cold. The heavy, looming clouds. I know that being in the Grand Canyon on this precipice isn’t the culmination of anything. It’s also not the beginning. It’s just now. Only now. I’m merely sitting on a trail in a place that was impossible for me to be a year ago.
I’ve learned how to be better at paying attention to this sort of thing. It wasn’t always so; I’d skitter here and there, spin around and around, look anywhere but here. I’m still not entirely healthy, but I’m not entirely sick. I exist somewhere in between and yet I am safe. What I’ve learned through two years of illness is that we’re taught to fear these spaces in-between, those times squished between diagnosis and cure, between broken and healed, between who we were and who we are becoming. But sitting here on this ledge, I can see how life isn’t lived in the destinations we arrive at or leave. It’s lived in the revelations that occur between different destinations. My recovering body has taught me that healing isn’t about returning to what was, but about finding grace in what is.
I sat on that edge thinking I had arrived. That the Grand Canyon was proof I’d made it to the other side of chronic illness. But I knew I was censoring that story.
Within 24 hours, my body would teach me otherwise.
Over the next six weeks, I’ll be sharing the rest of this chapter, sharing the moments of reckoning that followed that cliff edge, the childhood memory that shaped how I survive, and the medical complications that reminded me healing never concludes.
But today, I want to sit with this question: Where are you living in the in-between? How does it sit with you?
Maybe you’re between diagnosis and treatment. Between hoping for a cure and accepting the symptoms as just another thing to manage in your life. Between the person you were before your body changed and whoever you’re becoming now.
Maybe you’re between jobs, between relationships, between versions of yourself.
The in-between isn’t comfortable. But I suspect it’s exactly where we learn the most about who we actually are.
Please share in the comments: What in-between space are you navigating right now?
I’ll be reading every response and replying throughout the week. This is a conversation, not a monologue.
Next Monday, I’ll share what happened the morning after that Grand Canyon moment—when my body reminded me that I was still very much in the process of recovery.
Until then, I’m holding space for all of us living in the middle of our stories.
With you,
Susan
Absolutely loved the voice over component to this!!