Winter Doldrums: The Way Out Is Through
On Thanksgiving Day, I made a deal with myself to forego dinner invitations and stay at home with a spacious day to knock out a bunch of work. I got off to an auspicious start: woke up around 6am, made tea, fed the critters, meditated. While drinking my tea, I watched a TED talk on YouTube, which rolled on to other alluring videos. I made myself breakfast, and another tea. Hunkered down in bed and watched some more stuff. It’s a holiday, after all! I noted each passing hour telling myself I’d start work soon, until it was 1pm. Morning was long gone, and I had done exactly zero work.
At 2pm, I gave up the pretense entirely and watched some holiday movies (Batman Returns — Christmassy!), made myself a salmon dinner with spiced apple cider and settled in to enjoy the evening. But I couldn’t. All pleasure was marred by my disappointment in myself. I hadn’t done what I set out to do. I felt deflated, unmotivated and self-defeated.
Thanksgiving Day marked the beginning of a distinct downward shift in energy. For a good while before that, I’d been feeling generally energized and had a naturally occurring impulse to work on my business (i.e. I felt motivated). But in the weeks following Thanksgiving, I had little enthusiasm for anything that didn’t involve bed, movies or my fuzzy pets. I didn’t want to go anywhere or do anything “productive”. No matter how much I cursed and browbeat myself, I could not make myself want to do much at all.
It wouldn’t have been so bad had I simply surrendered to the doldrums and indulged in cozy evenings and low activity. But I had two things working against me — an internalized culture that pays little heed to ebbs and flows and demands a monotonously high rate of industriousness at all times, and a fledgling solopreneur business that wouldn’t take off without me nudging it. It’s one thing to throw off your shackles with abandon and run hedonistically through fields of pleasures. It’s quite another to have your mind poking, prodding, kicking, nagging, lecturing you as you try to catch up on the latest episode of Red Table Talk.
As a result, I teetered between anxiety and depression, caught between a rock and a hard place — where I was both the rock and the hard place.
Then I had a coaching session that made a subtle yet dramatic shift, in the way that coaching does.
I had been encountering my lethargic winter energy like a big cement block obstructing me from how I wanted to be. While being coached, I pondered what it would be like if this down period had a reason for being. What if things were unfolding exactly as they were meant to? When I looked through this lens, the energy started to feel more like some subterranean, slowly churning force, like a compost. I didn’t know what was being brewed there or how or why, but suddenly it felt alive and fluid rather than static and unalive.
This new perspective meant two things:
- This period of “down” energy had a purpose, even though I didn’t know what it was and wasn’t in control (gulp).
- Like all moving, living things, it would pass, and things would change.
This was an immense relief. Most importantly, it meant that I could proceed with trust that everything would work out okay.
So I faced a choice: I could accept what was (feeling low-energy), or I could not. To not accept it was to continue on that same path of feeling heavy and tired, but with guilt and frustration and fear piled on top. So instead, I decided I would accept it. I’d feel what I was feeling with permission and spaciousness. I would flout the cultural tenets of how I should be and what I should do, and freely go about the business of not doing.
So that’s what I did. I didn’t work on my business except to fulfill pre-existing commitments. Other than my part-time job, grocery shopping and other necessities, I didn’t go out. I didn’t make excuses to myself or others. When an explanation was called for, I just said I was in deep winter mode, and please come again after the solstice.
One day just before New Year’s, about a month after I’d started feeling that heavy energy, it started to lift of its own accord. I woke up one morning feeling…promise.
Then out of nowhere, I wanted to work again. So I did. Not a lot — I still felt tired and inward, but I was feeling a genuine impulse to move again, connect with others and stretch, as if after a long hibernation.
The miracle for me was two-fold:
- Once I regarded the energy as alive and fluid and let it be, it morphed all by itself.
- I rode it out with a modicum of grace and presence — even pleasure — that hadn’t been possible in the face of self-judgment and resistance.
The absolute worst part of the down-energy in the beginning was the fear — fear that this was the new normal, that it was my depression come back to claim me, that it would cause me to fail in my work and in my life. Irrational fears to be sure, but exactly the kind that come from the depths of our primal brains.
Once I let go of the fear, I just felt…inward. Downward. It wasn’t so bad after all: long dark evenings in bed with cats, tea and Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman — could be worse!
Moral of the story: feel your feelings and look your fears in the face. Tell them thank you, got it, and I’m choosing my own path. This is the kind of stuff I’d like in my Life Instruction Manual next time around.
