As all readers of fantasy know, names are powerful things. Which explains my excitement when I found a name for the kind of person I am…
Just over a year ago, I read an article by someone called Jennifer Brandel that made me go: “Exactly! There’s a name for that thing I’ve always known about myself but couldn’t name.”
(Of course, there is almost certainly a German word for that knowing/unnamed feeling – please let me know?)
The article in question – Invisible Landscapes – said scientists had found or named or noticed a structure in the human body which had not previously been described: a network of connective tissue found just beneath the skin and wrapping around organs, arteries, capillaries, and veins, from head to toe. It’s called the interstitium, says the article, and it:
“is fractal… It’s unified. While scientists had seen glimpses of this mesh-like network before, they had not realized that it connected the entire body – just underneath the skin… It’s juicy. It moves four times more fluid through the body than the vascular system does. The fluid isn’t blood, it’s a clear and ‘pre-lymphatic’ substance, carrying within it nutrients, information, and new kinds of cells that are only just being discovered.”
There’s a lot more in the article, and I must say that I am absolutely not qualified to assess the scientific or medical veracity of this. I’m a born sceptic and I could, of course, have done fact-checking but I didn’t do that, which is unusual.
It’s the metaphor that matters
I was much more interested in the metaphorical meaning the writer drew from this physical idea. There’s a level in which it’s not important to me whether there really is an interstitium or not.
Here’s the metaphorical bit: In the original article and on her website, Brandel says that there are people who function like the interstitium, people (like her) who “play the role of the connective tissue, and are the secret to how everything works. And they’re basically invisible, despite being ubiquitous. They are … interstitionaries.”
When she discovered this, in a restaurant with a friend, she says, she had to stop herself from spilling her drink and “yelling triumphantly to the agitated patrons: ‘Sorry about that, everything just makes perfect sense now!’”
Dear reader, that’s how I felt when I read that article.
Because that’s what I am: an interstitionary.
All my life, I’ve been seeing patterns and connections. Untying knots because I kinda know which bit of string is holding back the other piece of string. Understanding why people do the particular things they do, putting together things people say over time to start to predict that they’ll do next. There’s never been a way to explain that, or to make clear how it is valuable. So getting a name for it felt like a gift.
What happened next? Not much really
I did a survey (try it here), signed up for a newsletter, got an email and then didn’t hear anything for a year.
Then, on Valentine’s Day in 2025, I had another email. The Interstitium project (which is open-ended and open-minded and is starting, it seems, with building a network) is back on track. I’ve signed up for something called “Seeding Adjacent Possibility”, in which I am going to be randomly assigned to conversations with five different people. This month I’m setting up a conversation with someone in Austin, Texas.
I don’t have any idea what I will talk to this person about, and that feels wonderful.
Why am I telling you all this?
I want to share how excited I am to be doing something so out of the way of my normal life. And I’m grateful still to have found a word that describes what people have generally called my “witchiness”. To be clear: I like being thought of as a witch but mostly I like knowing that there are other people who also sit in webs of knowing things, like me. I hope to be finding more of them.
To that end, I wonder if any of my readers think they might be an interstitionary? I recommend starting with the Orion article if that’s the case (the link again: Invisible Landscapes; I think you might need to make an account to read it). And be in contact: I’d love to talk.
Main picture: Working rope used by the fishermen of Anstruther, Scotland which looks knotted and impossible to untangle, says the caption by Crawford Jolly on Unsplash
OTHER THINGS I HAVE WRITTEN
Life’s compasses: What I learned from Terry Pratchett | Safe Hands
Learning the power of gratitude | Safe Hands
Where I stand: A declaration of values and biases | Safe Hands
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