Somewhere Between the Ache and the Becoming: Why I Stopped Creating Content for Now
“Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create.”— Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera
There are two words tattooed on the inside of my wrist: Nepantla and la facultad. The ink has blurred a little over the years, which seems appropriate because so have I.
Those words have been there since my graduate-school years at Texas Woman’s University, where I studied Women’s Studies along with women’s history and literature. Dr. AnaLouise Keating introduced me more deeply to the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, and I became fascinated with ideas that gave language to things I had sensed long before I knew what to call them.
Recently, I found an old paper of mine dated August 6, 2008: From South Texas to North Dakota, From Gloria Anzaldúa to Louise Erdrich: A Cross-Cultural Literary Study of Nepantla. Apparently, this is a word I have been wrestling with for a very long time.
My mother got pulled into my graduate-school world too. Mom had earned her GED and done some college, but during those years she experienced a fair amount of graduate school right alongside me without having to pay the tuition. She read things I brought home, talked about ideas with me and became especially interested in Anzaldúa. At some point, she sat down with an ordinary piece of white paper and some markers and drew her own interpretation of Nepantla.
It is busy as hell. There are eyes, hearts, questions, words, colors, a tree and an enormous blue shape winding through the whole thing. It is neither academic nor polished, which may be exactly why I love it so much. I still have it.
I also found a photograph of my graduate-school office. Papers and books are everywhere, naturally, and a huge Anzaldúa binder is sitting in my briefcase on the floor. Years later, when I posted that picture on Facebook, I joked that Mom probably got as much out of my time there as I did without paying tuition.
Near the end of that period, she traveled with me to San Antonio when I presented at a graduate student symposium. I was digging deeply into Anzaldúa’s work on Nepantla and thinking seriously about where my thesis might go. Life went somewhere else.
I came close to finishing graduate school, but that chapter remained unfinished. The years that followed contained addiction, trauma, family, mental health struggles, recovery, relapse, God and plenty of other things the woman sitting in that cluttered office could never have anticipated. For a long time, I thought of her almost as somebody I used to know.
Lately, I’ve been remembering what I liked about her. She was hungry to learn, and she could follow an idea for hours simply because it interested her. Nobody had to click on it. There was no SEO package waiting at the end. She wasn’t wondering whether she could turn the damn thing into a reel by Tuesday. Curiosity was reason enough to keep going.
That kind of curiosity has been coming back to me lately, and so has an old word.
Anzaldúa used nepantla to describe an in-between space, although calling it simply “the space between” doesn’t really do her work justice. Her understanding of borders grew out of her experiences as a Chicana, Tejana and queer woman living among different cultures, languages, identities and spiritual traditions. Over time, she developed Nepantla into a much larger way of thinking about what happens when familiar categories and identities begin to break apart and something new has not yet fully formed.
Her concept of la facultad has stayed with me too: a heightened way of perceiving what lies underneath the obvious surface of things, particularly when life has forced us to become attentive to what other people might overlook.
Anzaldúa wrote in Borderlands/La Frontera, “Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create.”
When I studied her work years ago, I approached these ideas through scholarship, literature and theory. At fifty, I have enough life behind me to recognize some of them from the inside. The middle looks considerably different when you are living there.
That brings me to why I ended the podcast.
A Season I Am Proud Of
For three and a half years, Grit & Grace was a substantial part of my life. Long before the podcast existed, Mike McInerney and Charlie Smither took a chance on me when I had no experience hosting a live radio show. They were older than I was and older in the faith, yet somehow they trusted me with an hour of live radio teaching the Bible. I have never forgotten what that meant to me, and I never will.
Those beginnings eventually grew into a podcast where I had conversations about Scripture, addiction, trauma, relationships, mental health, family and the complicated business of being human while trying to follow God. Guests trusted me with deeply personal stories, and listeners sometimes trusted me with theirs.
Life continued outside the microphone, of course. My family changed considerably during those years, and so did I. There were struggles I overcame and others I didn’t. I made mistakes, learned things about myself I would have preferred not to know and went through periods when showing up behind a microphone every week took more out of me than anybody listening could have known.
Yet I maintained the show for three and a half years, and I am proud of that.
I want to say something else plainly because I know how easily people fill in the blanks when someone announces that a show is ending. The audience had not disappeared. My numbers hadn’t collapsed, and I wasn’t quietly limping away from something that had failed. There was growth during the life of the show, even though it was never exponential, and the audience remained remarkably steady through some very uneven seasons in my own life.
I am walking away with my head held high because I believe the show did what it was supposed to do. It served people, gave me a place to use my voice and taught me a great deal about what that voice actually sounds like. I also believe it belonged to a particular season of my life, and somewhere during the final weeks I became increasingly certain that season had reached its natural end.
The strange part was that I sensed the change before I understood it.
Something Moving Underneath
For a week or two, I felt deeply uncomfortable. The best description I have is that God seemed to be pushing me out from somewhere inside myself. I’ve experienced conviction plenty of times, and God certainly isn’t short on material when it comes to me. This felt different because there was no sense that the work itself had been wrong or that I should regret doing it. Something that had once felt alive and necessary had begun to feel finished.
There was something else happening at the same time, though, and it has been harder to explain. God has been digging around in places I would rather keep tidy. He has been showing me things about myself that are uncomfortable to see clearly, including some places where pride has been involved. I have felt humbled and, at times, leveled by it.
Maybe that is part of what this particular in-between season requires from me. Becoming sounds lovely until you realize that some things have to be exposed, loosened or surrendered for anything new to have room. Growth has a way of sounding inspirational from a distance and feeling considerably less charming while God has His finger on something you would rather He leave alone.
I don’t have all of that figured out yet. I suspect that is the point.
At the same time, I had become increasingly uncomfortable with the machinery surrounding content creation. The internet has its own demands: publish consistently, grab attention quickly, remain visible and feed the algorithm. One good idea can be chopped into so many pieces that eventually you can barely remember what interested you about it in the first place.
I love technology, and I’m certainly not writing this with a quill pen by candlelight. Computers, editing software, social media and AI are useful tools that will remain part of my life. My concern is what happens when the rhythm required by those tools begins determining the rhythm of our interior lives.
That question becomes more important to me when God is involved.
A thought during prayer can become potential content before we’ve had time to live with it. Scripture can become material. A difficult experience can start organizing itself into a future episode while we’re still standing in the middle of it. I began wondering how much room I was leaving for something to belong only to God and me, without immediately considering how it might be explained, recorded, edited or shared.
People now have access to more information and content than at any other point in human history, yet information isn’t the same thing as wisdom, and content isn’t the same thing as presence. When it comes to my spiritual life, that distinction matters enormously. Technology can reproduce my voice, improve a photograph, organize my thoughts and distribute almost anything I make. The presence, anointing and power of the Holy Spirit belong to God, and I want enough quiet in my life to recognize the difference.
That concern eventually became the subject of the final episode. Josh and I spent about an hour talking about the Holy Spirit, His role in our lives and the importance of making room for Him to examine us, teach us and change us. By the time we finished that conversation, I knew the podcast had arrived where it needed to end.
An Old Word Comes Back
A few days later, I sat down at my desk with a small hexagonal canvas, acrylic paint and markers. Painting is relatively new territory for me, and I’m enjoying the freedom of being a beginner who doesn’t need to know what the hell she’s doing.
I covered the canvas in purple, teal and green, then added gold and coral. Lines moved across it, running beside one another, crossing and separating. Eventually, two words appeared over the whole mess: Nepantla and la facultad.
Someone took pictures while I worked. When I looked through them later, one photograph caught my attention. I was hunched over the little canvas with markers scattered across my desk, while the artwork for the final episode about the Holy Spirit was sitting on the screen beside me.
Almost twenty years after I first encountered Anzaldúa’s ideas in graduate school, I was painting those words while closing another chapter of my life. There is something beautifully strange about that to me.
I have spent a lot of years trying to understand transitions after the fact. Once enough time has passed, we can arrange the pieces into a story and explain what everything meant. Nepantla asks something different of me because I am currently standing inside the part that hasn’t resolved itself yet.
That is where the ache comes in.
Some of it belongs to the ending itself. You don’t spend three and a half years building something, loving parts of it, fighting with other parts of it and then feel nothing when you put it down. Some of the ache comes from uncertainty, but the deeper discomfort lately has come from being asked to look at myself more clearly.
There are things about ourselves that are much easier to analyze than to change. I know enough psychology, theology and theory to give plenty of things impressive names. None of that saves me from the considerably less glamorous work of letting God show me where I have been prideful, defensive, afraid or simply wrong.
Perhaps la facultad means something a little different to me now too. Seeing beneath the surface is useful until the surface being examined is your own.
That has been humbling.
It has also made this season feel less like an empty space between two projects and more like a place where something is actually happening.
Somewhere Between the Ache and Becoming
I have ideas about what comes next. Some involve painting and photography; others involve books, spiritual questions, family, music, nature and whatever subject catches my attention hard enough to send me down a rabbit hole. I want to write when I have something worth writing and record conversations when there is a conversation worth having. My weekly personal letters will continue because I value the smaller, more intimate space they have become.
Mostly, though, I want to recover the freedom to follow curiosity without demanding an outcome from it.
I want to pick up my camera because the light caught my attention and make mediocre paintings because I enjoyed making them. Reading something difficult for three days without wondering what I am going to do with what I learned sounds pretty damn good right now. Some experiences with God deserve enough privacy to change me before I try to explain them to anybody else. My family deserves my undivided attention sometimes, and there should be rooms inside a human life where an audience simply isn’t invited.
Maybe that is what feels so familiar about this moment. The young graduate student in that cluttered office was intensely curious about what happens to human beings in the middle of things. She studied it, wrote about it and eventually tattooed the language onto her body. Then life took her through enough borders of her own that she nearly forgot the theory altogether.
My mother drew Nepantla for me with markers on printer paper. Years later, I carried those ideas into my own research and traveled with her to San Antonio to present some of that work. Now I am sitting in another cluttered room, painting the same word on a little canvas while a three-and-a-half-year chapter of my life closes beside me.
I have no neat conclusion for that, and for once I don’t particularly need one. Something has ended well. Something else is beginning to move underneath the surface, while God seems considerably more interested in what is happening inside me than in how quickly I figure out what to call whatever comes next.
That is where I am right now: somewhere between the ache and becoming.
To Mike and Charlie, thank you for handing me that first microphone and trusting me before I had any evidence that I knew what to do with it. To every guest who trusted me with a story, every listener who wrote to me, and every person who watched, prayed, shared an episode, challenged me or simply stayed around, thank you for helping make these years what they were.
The microphone can rest for a while, and so can my need to know exactly what comes next. I have spent enough years trying to get to the other side of things as quickly as possible.
This time, I think I’ll stay here long enough to see what God wants me to notice. To receive personal letters from me once every week or two during this transition, join my email list. I am growing this space as organically as possible. I get more intimate with my subscribers. I ask that they write me back as well so we can develop real connection. It's a safe space. I'd love to have you join me. Just fill in the form at the bottom of any page on my site.
Meanwhile, I'd love to hear about some of you experiences in the liminal in-between space. You can comment below or submit your comments privately through the form.
— Tonya Bruton
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