There are places in the world where the ground feels thin. You know them—not with your eyes, but with your skin. With your bones. The places where mist clings low to the earth, and your breath comes just a little slower. Where the silence has a shape. A hum. A whisper in a tongue you don’t speak but somehow understand.
They are doorways. Not just metaphors, but real doorways—between one world and the next. These in-between spaces hold a unique beauty, a mystery that beckons us to explore.
In Celtic lore, children were warned not to linger at thresholds. Don’t stand too long between the cottage and the wildwood. Don’t play in the fairy ring. Don’t offer your name. Don’t promise the fae anything you’re not prepared to lose.
They knew that in-between spaces carry power. And danger.
I’ve been standing in one for most of my life. I was taught to be “normal.” Not expressive. Not sensitive. Not me. I was trained—intentionally or not—to tuck my magic away. To fold it behind clean sentences and smiling masks and mid-’80s definitions of girlhood. What I wasn’t taught was that being autistic meant dwelling in the doorway. Feeling things more. Seeing between.
That’s what they never understood—Being neurodivergent doesn’t mean we lack empathy; it simply means we experience it differently. Our empathy is a powerful force that guides us through the world in a unique way. It means we drown in it. It means we feel the fire before it burns. We hear the ancestors sighing in the wind. We know when a shift is coming—not because we’re prophets, but because our bones begin to ache before the thunder cracks.
The world is aching now. Something’s smoldering. The Grand Canyon is burning, and it is not a result of climate change. I think it’s Gaia— smudging the world in sacred smoke. This is a call to action, a reminder that we must choose— heal or rot, return or run.
I see the signs in the sky, and I feel them in my joints. And I am tired of being told that my fury is not professional. That my tears are inconvenient. That my way of being in the world is too loud, too strange, too much.
You know what lives in doorways? Magic. And monsters. And women like me, but I’m not stepping back anymore. I’ve chosen the threshold.
And from this liminal place, I will speak. I will create. I will not be small.
Let the others fear the doorway. Let them build their lives with blueprints and cement. I’ll be over here, building bridges from ash and starlight. Writing spells disguised as essays. Whispering to the changelings. Calling the wild ones home.
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