Suddenly, I found myself in a state of unrest, questioning the nature of my emotions, recognising that certain affective states are merely transitional. But what happens when you can’t explain a feeling?

# Stone in Focus playing in the background  – Aphex Twin.

Something caught my attention. A comment. A sentence that managed to amplify my state, to pull it out of the fog:

“This is how it feels to not know if you’re getting better or worse, and you’re stuck between wanting to keep fighting or just let go.”

At that moment, I didn’t know whether I was to rebuild myself or disintegrate (what is deconstruction anyway?). Whether what I was experiencing was a process of personal growth or a slow form of losing myself. Whether the fight was a sign of vitality or merely a reflex born from the fear of letting things fall apart. (This, coupled with a certain abstract joy. Am I making sense?)

Identifying with that sentence made the feeling more legible. As if someone had turned on a light in a room you already got used to in the dark. Suddenly, it was no longer just a diffuse state; an in-between-better-and-worse. Maybe some states are not meant to be solved, only traversed. They don’t demand decisions, but patience.

This in-between is neither victory nor failure. It is a process. A form still searching for itself. As confusion is not necessarily a sign of being lost, but proof that something within you is moving, even if you don’t yet know when or where to budge.

Rite of passage: the liminal phase designates the intermediate, ambiguous moment in which the subject no longer belongs to a stable identity, yet has not acquired a new one. It is a zone of indeterminacy, characterised by the suspension of structures and certainties (Turner 1969: 94–95).

This experience of not knowing whether you are “getting better” or “falling apart” is, in a sense, a confrontation with nothingness (das Nichts). 

For Heidegger, nothingness is not the simple absence of being, but the horizon in which familiar meanings withdraw, and existence becomes strange to you. Anxiety has no determinate object; it reveals nothingness as an ontological opening (1998: 82–88).

Yet this nothingness can also be understood as an internal structure of consciousness, a field of potentiality. 

Keiji Nishitani describes the traversal of nihilism as a passage toward a deeper level of reality, where emptiness gives way to openness. Thus, the state of suspension should not be interpreted exclusively as loss, but also as a fertile moment of reconfiguring meaning (1982: 67–73).

Maybe you don’t have to choose between fighting and letting go. 

A third option: to remain. 

To stay in that uncomfortable space without budging. 

To accept that sometimes transformation does not feel like ascension, but like disorientation. (So many thoughts…)

And perhaps the very act of questioning yourself entails that you (still) care enough to live within uncertainty.