I had a dream last night that I woke up screaming from.

There was a shadow. A child’s room. A dark hallway. And somewhere in the dream I was standing outside an old church telling a preacher exactly what I believed — not because I was lost, but because I was furious that he assumed I was.

I’ve been sitting with that dream all morning. And what came up surprised me.

I wasn’t wandering. I was remembering.

For years I understood my spiritual life as a desert journey. Dry, disorienting, desperate. And there was a pastor who offered water. I kept going back because I kept being thirsty. What I didn’t understand then — what I understand now in my bones — is that the desert was manufactured. The thirst was cultivated. And the pastor positioned himself as the only source of water in a landscape he helped create.

That’s not ministry. That’s a system doing exactly what it was built to do.

The theology does it first. If you are born broken, if your own judgment is fundamentally compromised, if you cannot trust what you know in your own body and your own heart — then of course you need someone else to interpret, to guide, to hold the water you’re convinced you cannot find yourself.

I know what that desert feels like from the inside. It feels like never quite enough. Like striving and striving and still coming up short. Like an anxiety that hums underneath everything — what if I don’t believe hard enough, what if my brokenness is finally too much and the more I’m desperately reaching for just… leaves.

The desert isn’t dramatic. It’s quiet and chronic. And it feels like your own failing rather than the architecture around you.

I understand that feeling in a particular way. I was adopted. One of the earliest messages I received — not always in words, sometimes just in the air — was that where I came from didn’t matter. That my original belonging, my blood, my before — was something to be replaced rather than honored.

The church offered a similar bargain. Come as you are but become what we need you to be. Your original knowing — your instincts, your body’s wisdom, your inner life — hand that over. We’ll tell you what it means.

Both systems required the same thing. That I distrust what was already mine.

The unraveling didn’t begin with a thunderclap. It began with someone sitting across from me, angry, voicing the exact words I’d heard in private from someone I trusted. And something in me went very quiet. Not peaceful quiet. Alert quiet. The kind that means something is wrong.

I didn’t want to believe it. My first instinct was to protect what I’d built my life around. And that resistance — that fierce unwillingness to see what was coming into focus — tells you everything about how deep the system had gone. It wasn’t just beliefs I held. It was the air I breathed. The community I belonged to. The framework through which I understood myself, my family, my place in the universe.

Leaving didn’t just mean changing what I believed. It meant losing everything built around those beliefs.

If you’re sitting somewhere right now with that same quiet alert feeling — something’s not right but you can’t quite name it — I want you to know something. That feeling is not a spiritual attack. That feeling is not weakness or faithlessness.

That feeling is your own knowing. And it was always trustworthy. Even when you were told it wasn’t.

The shadow in my dream chased me down the hallway. I woke up screaming.

But sitting with it this morning I understood something. The shadow wasn’t trying to destroy me. It was trying to reach me. Everything pressed down and unnamed and unwitnessed — it doesn’t want to haunt. It wants to find the light.

That’s true of our own unprocessed places. And I think it’s true of everyone still sitting in a pew feeling vaguely suffocated and not knowing why. Still flinching when the worship music swells. Still wondering if the problem is them.

It isn’t. Your body is telling the truth.

You don’t need anyone to tell you who you are.

And you were never meant to do this alone.

Both things. Held together.

That’s what A Liminal Space is built on. Not another system asking for your dependency. Not someone with the answers shaping you into an image. Just someone who has walked this territory personally — who understands trauma, who has been inside the manufactured desert and found the way out — walking alongside you while you find what was always already yours.

I don’t hold the cup. I hold space for you to find your own water.

The river was always there. It was always yours.

This post was developed in conversation with Claude, an AI assistant made by Anthropic. The experiences, insights, and voice are entirely my own. Claude helped me shape and articulate what was already there.