Wintering and the Relief of Surrender

Well, hello. It’s been a minute since I wrote a thing. I’ve been hustling hard as a nearly 40-something trying to build a new career, and so I let the whole words on (digital) paper thing lapse a bit. But here I am!

It’s hard to explain just how harried, demoralizing, exhausting, and illuminating life has been in recent weeks. Over the course of the first six weeks of 2022, we had both kids in daycare at the same time for a grand total of eight days. We’ve been living the nightmare of pandemic-weary parents of young kids all across this broken country. A confluence of multiple routine childhood illnesses, two 10-day classroom closures due to Covid, and one subsequent positive case in our family, resulting in an additional 10-day quarantine, made for a deeply miserable month and a half.

Because I’m the underemployed parent right now, and my very part-time consulting gig affords near-total flexibility, I’m also the default parent. It makes sense. My husband is a public school teacher. He can’t work from home or just move some meetings around to take over so I can work. So, while he has definitely taken some time off during all this, I’ve been the primary caretaker.

In midst of our most recent stretch of Covid/illness hell (three weeks straight with kids home. Don’t recommend it), I had a job interview with an urban farm I’ve been super interested in for a while, which would’ve given me really valuable experience for a possible maybe future career. But a week later, when I was sick with my son’s stomach bug, my son was now on to what was probably Roseola back to back with his stomach bug, his fevers rocketing up to 104 and 105 degrees for days on end, and my daughter home on yet another Covid classroom closure, I withdrew my candidacy. The idea of taking on a second job right now, especially one that required mostly in-person work and frequent weekend days, was unimaginable.

For most of the past year I’ve been working on an idea for a nonprofit community farm. I’ve been networking, researching, volunteering with urban farms, meeting with people, talking ideas, scouting locations — hustling — since spring 2021. I’m actually quite confident at this point that I could make it happen. I’ve got a solid plan and I know where to get the funding.

But I’m stopping.

In the depths of pandemic misery this month, I finally realized I’m just too damn tired. Burnout has worked its way deep into my bones. I’ve got about eight working brain cells left. Chalk it up to two years of constant risk calculations and anxiety. The collapse of kids, work, and home life into one isolated and monotonous space. Always wondering when colds or runny noses are something more. Constantly dreading school closures and quarantines. And navigating difficult decisions about whether and how to see extended family, some of whom aren’t being nearly as careful as we are (or aren’t even vaccinated, making things especially challenging). Add an endless stretch of kids home sick or quarantining, and I had to stop denying that it’s time to just surrender, at least for a while, to the moment that I’m in, that my body is in, that my family is in. I need to fucking rest.

Here’s the other reason I’ve decided to say “no more” to the grind. I’ve been working so hard to figure out my next career steps, I’ve been so afraid of slowing down or taking a pause, that I don’t even know anymore if my dream of starting a community farm is actually my “dream,” or born out of fear of the nightmare of being someone with a master’s and a law degree, and little in the way of career accomplishments to show for it. I’m a profoundly underachieving overachiever. You can bet Northwestern Law won’t be showcasing me in their alumni magazine anytime soon.

We are not a culture that is comfortable with people slowing down, with rest, or with perceived failure (unless it’s followed up by a big “win” like a million-dollar investment or a book deal or some such thing). We glorify the hustle and grind (I’m looking at you, Beyonce). We cheerlead people “following their dreams” at all costs. We love success that is tangible. We’re thrilled by money, of course, but we also love the success that oozes from titles and brand associations, media attention, the neon promise of everlasting growth and expansion. Manifest Destiny, but make it Instagram-worthy.

I’ve been surrounded much of my life by family, colleagues, and peer groups that exemplify a particularly rarefied (and often very white, wealthy, and deeply privileged) version of success. And I’ll tell you what, it’s fucked me up a bit. We’re talking ridiculous levels of educational attainment at the right schools, impeccable credentials, six-figure salaries, careers that only seem to have one trajectory — skyrocketing upward (especially the men. The ladies still struggle with getting those promotions that seem to just be heaped on to white men like whipped cream on a sundae). All those external confirmations that you are, in fact, an “important person” doing “important work.”

We’re all, to some extent, products of that which is modeled for us. And if that which is modeled for us isn’t what we want, it can be a bit hard to find your own tune amidst all that noise. At least, it has been for me, being a people-pleaser, which is a deeply annoying trait to have. So, I played the game (sort of) I felt was expected of me and got the credentials and the respectable job. For a while. Until that fell apart.

Good! An opportunity to get back on track! Reinvent myself! Except it’s a goddamned global pandemic. And, I dunno, the fact that we’re approaching one million people dead (PLEASE read the article I linked) in this country makes me sad (call me crazy) and the fact that we, as a country, are so accepting of that loss and so ready to move on makes me indescribably sad and alarmed. And the fact that there are one million fewer women in the work force now than pre-pandemic makes me so very angry. Meanwhile, men have recouped all their job losses since February 2020. I’ll let you noodle on what that’s all about. And I’ve come to think (even more so than I did a few years ago) that a lot of people in this country are very scary and deeply divorced from reality.

So, it’s hard to think of doing much of anything right now but mourning and fretting. Being a mother of two small children in a country that has both colossally failed at community care and emphatically believes: “Fuck mothers. Fuck families. Fuck people. Capitalism 4 lyfe!” is hard. So, I’m fucking tired and a bit lost, with brain fog so thick it’s a damn weighted blanket. But, like, not in a soothing way. And I can’t really discern anymore what I actually want to do from what’s expected of me — which at this point is to pick myself the fuck up and move on. Start that farm or whatever! Follow your dreams! I’m a storyteller. I know everyone wants the happy ending, or at least the “next big thing.”

But here’s the moral of this whole self-indulgent story. It took six weeks of illnesses and quarantines and interminable days that bled into the next and not even bothering to change out of my pajamas into my “day sweats,” let alone put on a bra, to truly accept that I’m in a period of what writer Katherine May would describe as “wintering,” — a season of the year, yes, but also a recurring season of our lives. In her book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times she writes: “Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider.”

Things feel pretty cold and gloomy right now. A kind of involuntary and unwelcome stasis has crept into my life. Actually, I think a LOT of people in this country are wintering right now. But most refuse to accept it. And that’s partly why everyone is fucked up and depleted and angry and in deep denial.

But, instead of fighting or ignoring the winter, I’ve decided to embrace it. I can surrender to it and acknowledge what it’s calling me to do, which is to slow down. To rest. To turn inward and reflect. It is not calling me to keep hustling. To network more. To stay up late researching and emailing and road-mapping my next venture. There will be a season for that. Or… maybe not? Because I’m not sure I ever want to work more than like, 25 hours a week (a topic for another post, perhaps).

When I decided a couple weeks ago to withdraw my candidacy from the farm job I thought I wanted, it definitely felt kind of sad. All of this feels kind of shitty (literally, when the stomach bug hit. Ba dum bum!). But that’s okay. May writes:

“[Since childhood] we are taught to ignore sadness, to stuff it down into our satchels and pretend it isn’t there. As adults, we often have to learn to hear the clarity of its call. That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness. It is the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need. It is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can. Wintering is a moment of intuition, our true needs felt keenly as a knife.”

I’m okay with the sadness. I don’t mind a little emo in my life. But, I’m also grateful for the relief of surrender. I’ve expended so much mental and emotional energy on trying to reinvent myself professionally and figure out my next steps, all while trying to process the societal and environmental devastation unfolding around us. Finally letting worries about my career go, I’ve felt so much lighter (and found time to write!). I’m in the season where the leaves have fallen from my branches, where life is contained and renewing, quietly, underground. Plants really do always provide the best lessons for life, if we just pay attention. And winter is full of wisdom if we’re willing to accept it.

So, for my part, I’ll wait and rest. I’ll just be where I am in this moment, allowing my time to unfurl as it will, without imposing the mandate of productivity. I’ll allow this winter to bring some clarity. And when this season is over the light will return and the days will grow longer. A couple weeks ago I quietly celebrated Imbolc. Known by lots of other names, including my favorite, “the quickening,” it’s an ancient Gaelic holiday that falls halfway between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox. It marks that time when the days get noticeably longer, and the earliest signs of life stir under the cold ground (or in the bellies of pregnant ewes, in the tradition of the holiday). Outside, the quickening is clear. A chorus of birds now greets the sun, which spills into my bedroom window earlier and earlier each morning, and fades ever later in the evening.

Life isn’t linear, it’s cyclical, always spiraling through light and dark, vitality and dormancy. Winter always transforms into spring, and the warmth returns. There’s a happy ending for you.