Did you know that I started this publication as an act of survival? I returned to a long-held dream of being a food writer after a job loss that left me unrooted. Disconnected from my voice and sense of self, I started writing to feel useful. I didn’t worry about success because I was already a failure. I had accepted that. Not as an identity, but as an act of growth. I nestled myself into a deep personal winter and took some time for my career to lay fallow.
I returned to the field and started writing down the ideas I wished were in the world. Nobody was going to read them anyway, so what’s the harm? I wanted to practice writing in my voice. And if my overlapping love of food and story could provide benefit to at least one person, well that would be really cool.
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In the beginning, I could write without the fear of failure because I hadn’t even considered defining success. I was focused on acquiring skills, not on my stats and performance.
I find this perspective to be difficult to maintain in the first quarter of the new year. I want to capitalize on all the fresh start energy. Shed some of the burdens of recent history by investing energy into creating amazing content. I want to cook good food and be the version of myself I see in my head.
Throughout the pandemic, I have been continually resilient, but heading into year three of this nonsense I noticed myself fraying at the edges. Like many of you, January came and rolled right over the top of me. In the New Year, I was going through the motions of resting and arose tired. I had little capacity to digest the year before, let alone get cracking marketing my freshly launched home cooking tutoring service.
Depleted. Anxious. Sad.
So many of us are in survival mode. We keep going, and if we are lucky, we find opportunities for setting aspirations so we have something to look forward to. I see and I hear the needed conversation about the fear of failure being a root cause of why we don’t start on a path or finish projects. I think what is missing from this topic is the nuance that comes to this idea if you are living in an elevated state.
Chronic busyness, stress, and anxiety cause your frontal cortex to be overactivated. This is the part of your brain that handles problem solving, comprehension, impulse-control, creativity, and perseverance. In other words, the entire collection of skills I need to either layout a goal or navigate shifts if I get knocked off track by external events. All this to say, in our current environment, it isn’t just fear that is in the way of us meeting or setting goals.
Collective instability makes us each vulnerable to living in an overactive state, and susceptible to influence. Even if as individuals we have managed to evade perfectionist thinking spirals, there is so much social pressure to get it together. For those in survival mode, it can be near impossible to plan more than a few days out at a time, respond to messages in a timely manner, or even eat consistently. We may feel nudged toward soothingly familiar coping mechanisms—old songs, margaritas, and nachos please—and then guilty for “being bad” or for not having the energy to invest in our goal.
It’s an all-or-nothing attitude that doesn’t serve us or set us up for sustainable success. We are so focused on individual performance that even self-care has been co-opted as a tool to make us more productive. It is capital-driven thinking and it is in contradiction to the natural rhythms of cyclical living.
Dear reader, I invite you to step away from linear thinking for a moment. Release that which hasn’t happened and consider this moment of winter. Be it reflected in the natural world, or more of a personal winter as Kathrine May describes in her book Wintering.
Winter is sharp. It demands introspection and a keen eye for potential. Tune in to your needs and write them down for reference. Let these notes guide you as the days brighten. When we look at our time as a growing season we shed algorithms and create a relationship with our growth. Seasonal rotations show us that it is little acts of growth that create the spring.
It is in daily practice and small actions where we find excellence—not perfection.
You may need to make space for rest before having the capacity to commit to healing, but the act of wintering doesn’t exclude investing in the future. In the old wheel of the year, we find sabbaths every 7-8 weeks. The most recent was on Febuary 2nd which denoted the halfway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. It is time to start making decisions about what seeds we will sow be it flowers or personal projects.
For me, this looks like creating a relationship with a therapist, putting dates on the calendar for family connection, and releasing my Empowered Meal Planning course.
There is so much uncertainty in our world, but I know 2022 will bring flowers because I am learning to plant them.
I would love to know what you intend to grow this year. Respond in the comments or reply to this email to engage in the conversation