I have lived my life in the in-between, pressed against limits both visible and invisible. I grew up poor in a single-parent household, with aspects of identity that marked me as “less than” in the cultural scripts of class, gender, and sexuality. I have faced the “fell clutch of circumstance,” and as a result of that hardship, I now carry with me the steady conviction of William Ernest Henley’s oft-quoted poem Invictus—that “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.” In spite of—or perhaps because of—“the bludgeonings of chance,” I grew determined to overcome the crushing weight of childhood poverty, ultimately rising to earn a doctorate.

Yet when I entered the world of higher education, seemingly having found a way through past challenges, new artificial boundaries lay before me—not a dead end but a maze of obscured obstacles. I was present but never fully accepted: too poor in background to be welcome in elite circles, too educated to be at ease in the communities I left behind, too outspoken for polite company, too cautious for activist spaces. Always straddling, never belonging.

This in-betweenness has become my vantage point. To live permanently at the margins of belonging is to see the walls when others see the whole world. We talk often about “limits” as barriers to opportunity or ceilings on advancement, but we rarely examine the experience of living on the border itself—where identity risks being shaped by constraint and survival requires constant negotiation. The liminal perspective, unwanted as it often is, makes visible what others cannot or will not see. What I notice is not unique, and it is not clairvoyance; it is simply the accumulation of 15 years of teaching, observing, and seeing patterns emerge that research has been documenting for decades.

In education, these ceilings are everywhere. My research with gifted and twice-exceptional learners reveals how these limits are constructed and enforced: Potential is capped not by ability but by institutional design. Tall poppies are told to duck, or they are trimmed until they wither. Supports blunt rather than sharpen, disciplining students into “acceptable” versions of themselves. The message is clear: Thrive, but not too much; question, but not too forcefully; succeed, but only within the box we have drawn for you. 

Teachers are not immune. At times it feels as though we are asked to meet every need, heal every wound, and solve every social ill—even though we know we cannot. Expectations multiply as class sizes grow, stretching depth into breadth until structural caps dictate who receives attention and who is sidelined. Some boundaries are necessary for safety and structure. But when exclusionary barriers disguise themselves as neutral—or worse, as helpful—they become obstacles to growth and ultimately erode the foundation that makes collective flourishing possible.

The same is true of social emotional learning. At its best, SEL equips students with language and strategies to move forward through challenges. At its worst, it demands performance: Express your feelings in approved ways, and risk sanction if you do not. Students quickly learn the lesson beneath the lesson—that authentic expression is dangerous, and silence is safer. The Overton window constricts.

To survive, many educators adopt the stance of “see and don’t say”—bearing witness to hypocrisy, while knowing that speaking plainly would be treated as disloyalty. What’s more, constraint shapes more than behavior; it shapes reality. Systems that once existed to expand possibility increasingly function as calibration devices, producing predictable outcomes and calling it virtue. When students and teachers learn to mask curiosity, intensity, frustration, or dissent, the system mistakes the silence for consensus.

At times I find myself pressured into the role of spectator—watching without interacting, choosing a seat at the edge that allows me to see both sides of the divide. This vantage point does not resolve contradictions, but it does bring them into view, revealing the fear that builds the barriers, the realities the barriers conceal, and the possibilities they obscure. Visibility is the first crack in the surface—not sufficient to solve the problems, but enough to make them impossible to ignore for those willing to look.

The more I teach, the deeper I apply what I’ve learned, the clearer this becomes: Boundaries are not neutral. They are too often tools of exclusion disguised as necessities, walls erected in the name of safety or order. The insistence that we suppress emotion in the name of stability, that we cap brilliance in the name of equity, that we narrow discourse in the name of civility—these are all ways of manufacturing conformity.

But naming the cracks, while important, does not in itself repair them. The big question is what we do once we finally see the architecture for what it is. Over the last several months, in the classroom and in my writing, I’ve watched a pattern repeat itself: Educational systems—governed by boards and administered through K-12 districts and universities alike—create limits they refuse to name, and then demand that teachers create stability to hide the instability. We pretend the house isn’t on fire so no one has to take responsibility for the smoke in our lungs. This is how limits reproduce themselves—not through grand decrees, but through daily rituals of compliance.

Grading works the same way. In theory, grades are feedback. In practice, they have become instruments of regulation—sometimes punitive, used to restrain deviation; sometimes affirmative, used to disguise failure. A grade can function as a ceiling or a floor long before it reflects learning, capping some students while inflating others who conform to expectations. That is a limit—not of ability, but of sanctioned expression.

We talk often about “limits” as barriers to opportunity or ceilings on advancement, but we rarely examine the experience of living on the border itself—where identity risks being shaped by constraint and survival requires constant negotiation.

Classrooms themselves operate under an increasingly captured logic. The appearance of equity matters more than the experience of learning. We flatten differences because acknowledging real variation is politically inconvenient. We narrow discourse because honest disagreement feels unsafe. We script participation so tightly that students learn silence is safer than thought.

These are not dramatic limits. They are quiet limits—the kind that accumulate imperceptibly at first until eventually the range of permissible thought has narrowed so far that most people no longer notice the walls. These are the limits that concern me most because they shape not just what students—and teachers—learn but what they believe they are allowed to think. And yet, I do not write entirely from a place of despair. The vantage point of the in-between comes with its own tools to begin repairing those cracks.

The first is unfiltered observation: refusing to pretend the house is not burning when you can feel the heat. Simply telling the truth about conditions is an act of repair because systems that depend on illusion cannot survive accurate description—and anyone who has worked within the education pipeline, from K-12 classrooms to university campuses and district offices, learns how necessary and how difficult honest observation can be. The second is restoring meaning to evaluation: refusing to let grading become punitive theater or hollow affirmation. When feedback becomes a conversation rather than a weapon or a reward, ceilings lift. Students re-enter the learning process instead of performing obedience to it. 

The third is making the invisible limits visible. When teachers, parents, and students name the subtle constraints—what can be said, what must be said, what will be punished—the spell begins to break. Limits lose their inevitability once they are recognized and acknowledged as constructed rather than natural. And the final tool is the vantage point itself. The in-between teaches a simple truth: Limits are real, but many are choices. Some boundaries protect; others simply pacify.

Limits will never disappear. But the invisible ones—the manufactured ones, the dishonest ones—are where systems quietly calcify. Repair begins by refusing to confuse walls for horizons, and by reclaiming the agency to decide which limits must be challenged and overcome, which must be kept, and which were illusions all along.