12: a reluctance toward spring 🌾
grief season, march sadness, hibernation (march 2021)
Iteration #12 of this monthly letter full of feelings.
This issue's theme is: ✿ a reluctance toward spring ✿
I'm not ready for the promise of more daylight. I'm not ready for life to start again – I don't want to open my window and see the sun, see everyone else coming to life, opening up their buds for spring. I feel like I'm still hibernating, wintering. I'm just getting started here in the darkness. I feel this way every year as spring starts to trickle in – I feel like I've forgotten something or I've missed something, like I was supposed to be catching up on something during the "off season" and all of the sudden life has started up again. It's compounded this year: the promise of life after winter, life after Covid, it feels daunting instead of exciting. I feel guilty and embarrassed, like there's something fundamentally wrong with me that my body is resisting spring awakening.
It feels wrong to want to tighten up while everyone else is opening. It feels like everyone moving ahead without me, and I'm so afraid of being left behind. Even just hearing someone else voicing a desire feels painful, feels humiliating almost. I'm ashamed of wanting to stay in bed while everyone else is waking up.
GRIEF SEASON
This shame around hibernation is familiar – I feel it every March. I call the months leading up to my dad's birthday and death day my grief season; the time of year when the anniversary effect kicks in, and all of the grief that's been hiding in shadows and cracks inside my body becomes more apparent. It becomes harder for me to keep it together, to keep up with any sort of perfect idea of who I think I'm supposed to be. I've learned to keep low expectations for myself this time of year, to feel whatever I need to feel. I've lashed out at friends, been impatient and prickly, but mostly I've just felt misunderstood and unseen.
For a while, it was hard to recognize the grief resurfacing in my body every March. I didn't start admitting to myself that I was affected by the anniversary until my twenties. It was so hard to start telling people that I was experiencing something around these monumental dates in my life – I felt like a fraud. I felt like everyone was annoyed with me, like I was making too big a deal of something that I "should" have been over by now (which is a terrible story to tell yourself, and a terrible story our culture has told grieving people). I felt so embarrassed of the burden of grief. I would tell people I was just sensitive and try to stay quiet, not let anyone see how heavy it felt. I was so afraid of being defined by my grief that I would never investigate it. I was so scared of someone telling me that I was "thinking about it too much" or obsessing about it, afraid of people getting tired of me still having to deal with this pain. That people would roll their eyes when they heard me talk about my dad. The fear of the feeling kept me from feeling it. No – the fear of feeling it kept me from naming the feeling, but the grief still showed up in other ways: in anger, resentment, bitterness, isolation, like a knot in my throat, always on the verge of tears.
Once I started sitting in the grief, it all became a lot less foggy. I let myself finally fall into it and understand the shapes it took in my life – where it charaded as aggression, forgetfulness, flakiness, fear, control. All of the ways that it seeped into the things I hate about myself. But once I started letting my grief take up space, I became so anxious about all of the other things that might fall apart while I was taking time to myself. I noticed panic and fear that I was going to forget something, that I'd miss something, or that my friendships would completely fall apart. I recognized how terrified I've been of blinking, of missing anything. Of slowing down, letting myself fade into the background.
There was something about the pause in the last year that felt almost comforting (as off-putting as that might sound), I was honestly relieved to not have to make excuses for staying in. We could all hibernate together – like we finally had permission to rest; I didn't have to feel ashamed of slowing down. I wasn't going to miss anything because everything was paused. I know that FOMO is just a tool to make you buy shit and feel inferior, but why can't I shake it?
THE RISK IT TOOK TO BLOSSOM
There's this Anaïs Nin quote that I always go back to, and used to think of in terms of getting out of an abusive relationship: “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” My friend Chelsea gave me a little postcard with this quote on it when I was recovering from my first abusive breakup. I wrote it on my body and took photos of myself when I was in my second abusive relationship and trying to navigate what it meant to bloom while I was still being held down.
You can't see the writing in the photo because I'm in silhouette; I'm not even sure if it was intentional at the time, but thinking about it now, the choice to write something on your body and photograph yourself in a way that would completely hide the writing – it speaks so truthfully to me about the shame I felt, knowing I was supposed to be blossoming but I had tethered myself to someone who would keep me down. I came across the quote again today, and thinking about it in the context of what I'm feeling now – maybe the day just hasn't come yet for me to be ready to blossom? You can't always be in bloom; rest and Wintering is necessary, spring is only one season for a reason. It I'm not being forcibly held in hibernation, I should be able to listen to myself and hear what I need.
We went to my dad's grave for his birthday, and I think it was the first time I've been there in probably 10 years? I think the last time I was there was when I took these photos; it was when I first started making photographs about my family. Anyway, it was a really lovely day; we had a picnic lunch & I made the usual yellow cake with chocolate frosting & we hung out with him for a few hours in the sun. Tommy told him we would have loved to see the garden he would have now, which was so sweet and true. It feels weird to have had such a good day at a cemetery, but whatever – let what's true be true, right? Feel what I feeeeeel.
I've been working on trying to get back into this project where I photograph and interview people who knew my dad. It's obviously been a tough thing to commit to, as I've been working on it off and on for the last... 5 years? Thinking about it for 10 probably? Anyway... it's kind of like a legacy project, but I think it's more than that. I think it speaks to where I'm from in a weird funny roundabout way. Anyway, I'm trying. So I've been living in my mom's basement since August, in the hometown I never thought I'd return to for longer than a week or two, and I'm trying to settle into it enough to see what it has to show me, and not just feel like I have to run away. I used to talk in therapy a lot about towing the line between the hillbilly I am and the city gal I want to be. I've been drawn toward these little "still lives" that feel just... so phoenix.
My friends Jordan Sondler, Anna Toonk, and I have been hosting a weekly 1-hour long clubhouse chat for folks who've lost parents. It's a really sweet little space on the internet to just hang out and listen or share. We talk about our grief & any weird feelings that come up or came up throughout the week. Join us one of these Wednesdays from 7-8pm! (Alsooo, LMK if you'd like an invite to clubhouse; I have extras!)
☁︎ How are you feeling? Are you blooming, wintering, something in between? ☁︎
What does it feel like when our insides don't match what it feels like on the outside, the inner seasons don't line up with nature's seasons?
⋰ If you'd like to read previous newsletters, they are archived here.
This newsletter was written from the Onundagaonoga (Onondaga) & Haudenosaunee territory To learn more about the stolen land you're occupying, visit native-land.ca ⋰
