Limbo dancing
For many of us, the last year has been a liminal time between a past that is evaporating and an uncertain future. The unknown sparked anxiety in Heidi Scrimgeour - until she discovered ways to thrive
A year ago, I had a sense of anticipation about what was ahead - career plans, trips and hopes tightly held. But the pandemic wreaked havoc, upending everything and forcing me into a liminal space. Liminality is the word psychologists use to describe the transition between one distinct season of life and another and comes from the Latin word for threshold.
IMAGE: GETTY IMAGES
Everyone I know seems to be experiencing this sense of limbo, from the colleague forging a new career out of the ashes of the old one that vanished overnight to the friend whose marriage buckled under the strain of lockdown.
"It’s hard to make sense of it all, but when we’re present with the messiness of our circumstances, magic occurs “
The rug is yanked
Then there’s me. My husband and I are self-employed but our industries - tourism and journalism - have been so impacted by coronavirus that we’ve lost our regular income. Living in limbo is incredibly stressful. I battle to keep at bay low-level anxiety about various imagined scenarios. What if we don’t find work before our savings run out? What if a local lockdown happens and I’m back to homeschooling our three children?