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How To Thrive in the In-Between
Three ways to survive your next season
Politically and culturally, we’re in a curious liminal moment: Many of us have more reasons to feel hopeful than we have in a long time, between the vaccines for Covid-19 and a new administration — but at the same time, personally and professionally we’re all running on emotional fumes. We’re about to hit the one-year anniversary of the pandemic’s arrival in the United States, but it’s still hard to see the finish line, or believe that there ever will be a definitive moment when we know it’s all over.
We’ve entered the in-between time — and being here is its own stress. Our human brains are bad at dealing with the unknown, and even worse at it when we’re tired. And intense emotions are in and of themselves exhausting, creating an insidious feedback loop.
So how are we supposed to deal?
One piece of advice that’s stuck with me is about finding ways to break up this long, uncertain slog. When the Evil Witches newsletter interviewed a group of mental health professionals about how to handle hitting the pandemic wall, Emily King, a psychologist in Raleigh, North Carolina, suggested thinking about different phases of the pandemic as seasons. “There was a season of campaigning and then waiting for the inauguration and there will be a season, I hope, of…
