We encounter them daily—unopened doors that we hesitate to push open. The job application never submitted. The conversation perpetually postponed. The creative impulse repeatedly ignored. The relationship that remains unresolved. These thresholds exist everywhere in our lives, silently waiting for the moment when our courage finally outweighs our fear.

In my novella The Purging Room, Phoenix Adams discovers a mysterious door in Manhattan’s meatpacking district. Behind it lies a speakeasy that shouldn’t exist, and beyond that, another door leading to a circular room where transformation awaits. But the physical doors are merely metaphors of the internal thresholds he has refused to cross for decades.

Why We Fear Certain Doors

What is it about certain thresholds that fills us with apprehension? Why do we avoid them, creating elaborate justifications for not crossing over?

Perhaps the answer lies in what awaits on the other side: change. Not just any change, but the kind that fundamentally alters how we understand ourselves and our place in the world. We intuitively sense that some doors, once opened, cannot be closed again. The knowledge gained, the perspective shifted, the experience embodied—these transformations are irreversible.

Phoenix’s journey in The Purging Room explores this truth. Each encounter in the circular chamber strips away another layer of conditioned identity, revealing aspects of himself he’s been taught to deny—his sensuality, his curiosity, his emotional depth, his spiritual freedom. With each revelation comes both liberation and responsibility. Freedom is never free; it demands the courage to live differently once the door has been opened.

The Doors We’ve Been Taught to Fear

Our reluctance rarely emerges spontaneously. We learn which doors to avoid through explicit warnings and implicit messages absorbed from family, religion, education, and culture.

“Don’t question too deeply.” “Stay in your lane.” “That’s not appropriate for someone like you.” “We don’t discuss such things.”

These messages become internalized guards that stand before certain doors in our being, warning us away with threats of rejection, shame, or the dissolution of our carefully constructed identities. By midlife, many of us have become so accustomed to avoiding these thresholds that we no longer notice them. They fade into the architecture of our lives—doors painted to match the surrounding walls.

The Role of Guides and Gatekeepers

Significant thresholds often require guides—those who have crossed before us and returned to offer direction. In The Purging Room, Phoenix meets both a gatekeeper (Mircea) and four guides who help him navigate unfamiliar territory. Their role isn’t to cross for him, but to create conditions where his own crossing becomes possible.

In our lives, guides appear in many forms: mentors, books, unexpected conversations, even moments of crisis that force us to see differently. The essential quality of a true guide isn’t that they push us through doors, but that they help us recognize which doors are actually ours to open.

Beware, though, of false gatekeepers—those who try to keep certain doors closed to you. They disguise restriction as protection, limitation as safety. They may genuinely believe they’re acting in your best interest, which makes their influence all the more difficult to recognize and resist.

Finding Courage in Midlife

There’s something especially poignant about crossing significant thresholds in the second half of life. By this point, we’ve invested decades in building our identities, relationships, and worldviews. The prospect of fundamental change carries higher perceived costs.

Yet midlife also brings unique resources for threshold-crossing. We’ve accumulated enough experience to recognize patterns. We’ve survived enough challenges to know our resilience. We’ve witnessed enough of life’s brevity to feel the urgency of living authentically before time runs out.

For Phoenix Adams, it takes the combination of professional success, spiritual disillusionment, and emotional exhaustion to make him ready for the transformative room. His emptiness becomes the very qualification that makes him receptive to what awaits beyond the speakeasy door with its brass mail slot.

The Threshold Moment

Every significant door-opening contains a moment of pure vulnerability—that space between commitment and completion when we are neither who we were nor who we will become. In that liminal space, we have surrendered our former certainties but haven’t yet integrated new understanding.

This threshold moment cannot be bypassed or accelerated. It must be experienced fully, with all its discomfort and disorientation. It’s the chrysalis between caterpillar and butterfly—apparently formless yet essential for transformation.

In our rushing world that values certainty and immediate results, the threshold moment feels unbearable. We want to pull back to familiar territory or leap forward to new certainty. But true transformation happens precisely within this uncertain space, this “between” that resists our attempts to control it.

One Door Opens Another

Perhaps the most profound truth about thresholds is that crossing one invariably reveals others previously invisible to us. Phoenix enters the speakeasy thinking he’s simply following a friend’s recommendation for an interesting evening, only to discover the circular room beyond it. Each transformation in that room prepares him for the next, in a sequence that couldn’t be altered without losing its power.

This progression mirrors how transformation unfolds in our own lives. We rarely see the full journey ahead. Instead, each threshold crossed clarifies our vision just enough to recognize the next one waiting. Had we seen all the doors at once, we might never have found the courage to open the first.

The Invitation

What door stands before you now, awaiting your courage? What threshold have you circled long enough, gathering the resolve to finally cross?

It might be a door of creative expression—the novel unwritten, the canvas unpainted, the song unsung.

It might be a door of authentic relationship—the vulnerability unhad, the truth unspoken, the connection undeepened.

It might be a door of internal reconciliation—the integration of aspects of yourself long denied, suppressed, or judged.

Whatever door awaits your crossing, know this: the fear you feel honors the significance of what lies beyond. Trivial doors don’t evoke our deepest anxieties. The very presence of that fear signals a threshold worth crossing.

In The Purging Room, Phoenix discovers that the doorways to his own transformation have existed all along, waiting only for his readiness to enter. The same is true for each of us. Our doors of possibility remain patiently present, neither rushing nor judging our hesitation, but never disappearing entirely.

The invitation stands. The threshold awaits. The door is ready to open.