I never see their faces. That is the first thing people seem surprised by when I describe my work as an Eligibility Specialist in a regional change center. There is no waiting room, no desk across from mine, no eye contact over a stack of forms. There is a phone. There is a voice on the other end. And there is, almost always, a person suspended in the middle of something — reaching out from whatever in-between they are living in, hoping the system on the other side of the line can help them find their way through.
What I hear in those voices, hundreds of times a week, has a name. The anthropologist Arnold van Gennep called it liminality — from the Latin limen, meaning threshold. In his foundational work on rites of passage, van Gennep described how human beings move through major transitions in three phases: separation from the old identity or state, a liminal period of suspension, and incorporation into something new. Victor Turner later expanded the concept, describing the liminal phase as a space of dissolution and radical ambiguity — where the person is, in a sense, between selves. Where the old has loosened but the new has not yet taken hold.
I think about that concept constantly. At my desk. In my psychology coursework. And late at night, when I am writing.
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What a Voice Tells You
There is something uniquely intimate about phone-based eligibility work — and something uniquely strange about it, too. I process paperwork. I verify income, household composition, residency. I update cases, explain determinations, navigate appeals. The work is transactional on paper. But the voices are not transactional. They carry everything. You learn, over time, to hear the liminality. It is in the slight catch before someone says they lost their job. It is in the careful, rehearsed quality of a caller who has told this story too many times to too many systems and has learned to strip the emotion out of it to survive the telling. It is in the background noise — a child, a TV too loud, the particular silence of someone calling from a car because they needed privacy. These are not just case details. They are coordinates of a person in the in-between. I cannot see them. But I can hear the threshold.
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When Trauma Holds the Line Open
Here is where the psychology of my graduate coursework becomes impossible to separate from the casework: trauma keeps people in liminal states long after the original crisis has passed. Dan Siegel’s concept of the Window of Tolerance describes the optimal zone of nervous system arousal in which a person can process experience and make decisions — neither flooded nor shut down. Repeated trauma, and especially developmental trauma, narrows that window dramatically. It trains the body to stay on alert, to read every new situation as a potential threat, to remain, neurologically, in the in-between. What this means over the phone is something I feel before I can articulate it. A caller who cannot remember a document they submitted last month — not because they are careless, but because the stress hormones flooding their system are not compatible with easy recall. A caller who becomes hostile when I ask for verification — not because they distrust me specifically, but because every institution they have ever trusted has eventually asked for something they could not provide. A caller who goes quiet when I explain a denial, a silence so total it almost has a texture. Trauma-informed practice, in a call center, is largely invisible. It does not show up in the processing notes. But it lives in the pace of a conversation, in the choice to repeat something without impatience, in the decision to say I understand this is a lot before launching into the next step. It is the small practice of making the threshold a little safer to cross — even when I cannot see the person crossing it.
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The Writer at the Other End of the Line
I also write queer erotic fiction. I know that lands differently in this context, but I am going to ask you to stay with me, because it is not incidental to any of this. The most alive moments in fiction happen in liminal space — in the charged suspension between what is and what is longed for, between the self that was and the self that is becoming. Desire is, structurally, a liminal state: the electric, unbearable space of not yet. When I write characters who are healing from trauma, navigating vulnerability, learning to trust someone with their body and their history, I am writing characters in the threshold. And everything I have absorbed from the voices on my calls comes with me. The way grief compresses time. The way safety has to be built slowly, in small repeated gestures, before the nervous system believes it. The way someone in the middle of a transformation does not always look like they are becoming — they often look like they are falling apart. I have heard all of that on the phone. I try to honor it on the page.
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On Holding the Line
There is a cost to this work that does not get named enough. Spending hours a day as a voice at the threshold of other people’s crises — without the physical cues, the body language, the grounding of a face across from yours — does something to the nervous system over time. Secondary traumatic stress does not require in-person contact. It travels just fine through a headset.
So I keep coming back to the question I carry into everything: how do I keep my own doorways open? How do I stay a person who can be moved by what she hears, who has not learned to protect herself by going through the motions on autopilot?
I do not have a settled answer. But I think it involves paying attention — to the voices, to the theory, to the stories I am trying to tell. It involves refusing the professional myth that efficiency and empathy are opposites. And it involves, I think, the strange discipline of writing — of taking what I have witnessed and making it mean something on the page, in the hope that naming the in-between makes it a little less lonely for the next person standing there. The call ends. The case updates. Someone on the other side of the line takes one more step toward whatever comes next. That is the work. It is enough. Some days, it is everything.
— Andrea Houtsch
English