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The surprise of old cold love

Every year it happens. I breathe deeply of the last days of Christmas, smile warmly and embrace the promise of a new year, vow to write and clean and sing and play through the dark days of winter into spring’s warming light. You know the feeling, the zing and glow of a new relationship, the ecstacy of snuggling with a love both new and familiar, the letting go into a sparkling river of hope and joy that carries you forward in a million dots of delight that nothing can touch or tame.

Until it happens. By the second week of January and the second snowstorm, irritable from lack of sunlight and frozen in the grey reality that is an east coast winter, life officially sucks. Why? Why after living my entire life in the same cycle of seasons does this take me by surprise every year, and why do I end up feeling the same way every time? It’s like being in a bad relationship, one that no longer supports or serves but its parties are too tired, too indifferent, too detached to care enough to end it.

And there was my green dot moment, a point of awareness in the gloom. It hit me the other morning as I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, debating whether to get up or stay put. I rolled over and heard the words in my head as clearly as if I had said it out loud.

“Oh, you’re still here …”

You’ve been there, cozy in bed, then you roll over and eye the snoring lump beside you, slammed back to reality. “Oh, you’re still here,” you mutter, in that moment wanting them and all the baggage attached to the relationship gone, but too mired in self-doubt, self-pity, or fear of being alone to say the words, set the plan, make it real. I promise to love January then wish it was July. I promise to love me, then wish I was someone somewhere else.

That morning, I said it, but the only snoring lump in bed was me. I was still here. I was promising for months to love myself but in reality, there were times when I really couldn’t stand myself. I wanted me and all my baggage gone, but then again, I wanted to be healthy and whole. Deep down I do love myself, but rarely do I let myself feel it like I feel the love I have for others. I simply don’t allow it. And when I don’t allow my love for myself, the love I have for others comes out filtered through my own loathing, feeling to them strained, arduous, inauthentic, not always identified, but sensed in a way that can be uncomfortable, unsettling. There can be no intimacy with that sort of chill underlying every breath and action, perpetuating the loneliness, inviting the frustration and then subduing it in a cloud of ‘who cares, there’s no point.’

I want to love January like I love July, for no reason than it is January, just January, with all its storms and cold and wind and darkness and greyness and isolation.  I want to love me like I love others in my life, for no reason other than I’m me, just me. No changes or fixing. Just me. My appearance, my talents, my fears, my stubborn habits, my restlessness, my desires, my crankiness, my joy. I need to embrace it all, stand firm in the things I find painful, allow joy where it beckons. A January nor-easter can freeze you to the bone and bury you in snow. It can also  make your skin tingle, blow the cobwebs from your brain, and coat your world in a powdery cocoon that invites indoor snuggling with cozy blankets, hot tea, and a fresh journal. July with all its warmth and beachy splendour cannot do that. Likewise, I am no beauty in the morning – or any other time of day for that matter – but I am who I want to be in this moment, and have the parts and pride to create what I want in the next moment.

“Oh, you’re still here.” Me speaking is the part of me stuck in the world that is ‘good enough’, safe and cozy by being inert and hidden because nothing is ever good enough or possible. Me listening, that snoring lump in the bed, is me cocooned, ready to toss off the covers and take on another day, with each footstep, each pile of laundry washed and deadline met is another step into a life I am creating.

You bet I’m still here. So is January. And thank God for it all. I don’t want it to be July, not yet. There’s much to do and love right now.

Thanks for being here.

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Healing in the post-holiday blahs

It was a marvellous Christmas, which for me was four weeks of pure immersive joy. Home and table full of three generations together by choice, eating and cooking and shopping and wrapping, playing games and watching movies … in the constant flow of positive energy even doing the laundry and washing the dishes were together time rather than chores. Memories into gems, moment by moment.

Of course the crash would come. Folks return home. Children go back to school. Life moves forward into the fresh pages of a new year. I knew this, I was ready for this. My older daughter, being driven back to PEI by her dad. My younger daughter, off visiting her boyfriend. My son, packing his car to head back to university. As I watch his car back out of the driveway, I feel it. The silence, heavy like a leaden blanket, as for the first time in weeks I am in the house alone. I sit, feeling the loneliness like a blackened iron curtain pushing my mood into darkness and my body toward the ground.

And as always, it is in these darkened spaces that great awareness lie.

I have always dreaded the new year. At first, I swallowed it as the post-Christmas sag, the transition between a home full of candy, lights and greenery to the grey routine of the everyday. Then I dismissed it as the seasonal blahs, where lack of sunlight and frigid cold kept me captive in house and thoughts. Now, as I sat weighted in a silent house, I realized my sadness was not with the inevitable departures and progression from Christmas to ‘real life.’ My grief was with the knowledge that there was no longer any distractions, any reasons, anything between me and going back to work. My grief was at the continued dysfunctional relationship I have with what I define in my life as ‘work.’

It was time for me to deal with it.

I allowed myself to feel the weight, the darkness, the sadness, the sinking … and like tipping a world upside down, there came glimmers of light, of possibility, of vision. What I felt was an invitation, the breeze of wide open spaces to create and to shine, and was wrapping myself in darkness as a way to hide. What did I want to create for my life, and where was ‘work’, what was ‘work’ in all of it? I asked myself the question and relaxed into my chair, allowing the answer.

I want a job where I don’t have to go to work.

I laughed out loud, but it wasn’t my voice. It was the voice of my ancestors, of friends and colleagues bound to their physical worlds of scarcity and survival. You need to work, you have to work, or else you starve, you’re a bum, you aren’t doing anything with your life. I thanked them for their input, swept it away, and sat with the statement. I want a job where I don’t have to go to work  was not me wishing to sit in my chair every day doing nothing, but me wanting a job that flows with the rest of my life, a job I take pleasure in as I do with hanging with my kids, visiting friends, watching movies, trying a new recipe, or breathing deeply as I watch the sun set. I want a job I do not need to take a vacation from, a job that gives and takes with ease and joy, a job with which I have a healthy relationship.

Healthy relationships require clarity and honesty. Between work and myself, I have rarely allowed either. Tasks and accomplishments were defined by others. Invited to lead, I would defer to the safety of minion. What mattered was the client’s needs, vision, deliverable. I allowed none for myself, and when  overtired and frustrated from not being heard, would tune out or walk away. The problem is not my job, it is in the labels and stories I continue to attach to ‘work’.

I have a job that allows me to set my own hours, choose my offices, determine my work plans, and engage with some of the warmest and most enlightened people I have ever met, people who continue to support and challenge me on my journey. And for all of this, I am paid promptly every two weeks, with full benefits, an annual raise and even a Christmas bonus. It is a job that fully supports my life and invites my creativity. If I let it. And there was the greatest awareness, that I have everything I want in work and in life. I have everything I need to create new and different.  I need to let myself know and trust it.

Healing my relationship with work, allowing it to be a source of joy rather than a chore, allowing it to invite my creativity rather than trap me in tasks, will not only lighten my new year’s transition. This allowance will transform my performance anxiety into creation, and will heal my relationship with my writing. For writing had become ‘work’, used only for generation of income to pay bills, allowed to do or be nothing else but a chore, and with no direct income from it, a waste of time. I still feel those pathways in need of clearing. I sit writing now after two days of growing agitation, where I had meant to write, was going to write, but other things got in the way … now, the 30 minutes I have spent with myself in words will clear clouds from the rest of my day and the excitement glowing in my gut – rather than the churning angst of fear – is so energizing, I sit here toasty warm on a freezing cold day. I am allowing myself to feel each invitation from ‘work’: doing so allows me to mindfully choose, willing immerse, and feel when it’s done. No more story of losing myself to work, or of my work being pointless. The difference made is not in the wider world, but in my relationship with it, and with myself. And I have these words as a reminder for when I forget. For the anxiety is never far away. I can feel it nudging against my warmth as I prepare to end my writing and shift to the files on my desk. I choose this, I can do this … and I choose to trust what happens after that.

Thanks for your presence. What a year this will be.