Liminality
Etymology
From Latin "limen," threshold. The anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, and later Victor Turner, used it for the middle phase of a rite of passage — the initiate no longer a child, not yet an adult. It has since spread to any suspended, betwixt-and-between condition.
noun · /lim-ih-NAL-ih-tee/
The disorienting in-between state of a transition — after leaving one status but before arriving at the next.
What it names
The suspended condition of being no-longer-this and not-yet-that — treating the threshold as a place, not a line.
Example
The months between the diagnosis and the surgery were pure liminality — she could neither resume her old life nor begin a new one.
Related idea
The noun-concept built from liminal; liminality is the threshold experienced not as a step but as a room one can be trapped inside.