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Unsettlement
Do you ever feel that something is shifting? Like you are on one side of a veil, about to step through, but to what, you don’t know. A subtle shift in the wind, a smell hinting on the breeze, a sudden illumination that suddenly highlights a whole different path. Like a diver tiptoeing to the edge of the high board. Toes curled over the edge, arms stretched above. That perfect moment of stillness. The held breath, the clear exhale. That infinitesimal pause, the pinpoint before, and then…
The pause amplifies. It wraps around me in its stillness, the infinite and the instant, endless depth and the deep black potential, waiting for an atom to shift the balance. What I saw as stagnation is instead a building, a deer gathering energy before taut muscles spring forward in a leap. The tightening of an elastic band before a snap. Feeling the pause, feeling the ache, the yearning for movement that is almost painful. I want to know what is on the other side. I want clarity, explanation, boxes, linearity. Instead, I teeter on the liminal.
I look back at cycles repeating themselves over and over and finally realise I need to let go. I feel the constant strive for something that fits in that neat box, for something tactile, solid, defined. The endless wish for that definition to fit in. But the realisation is I’m not made for linearity. I didn’t trust my tangentiality, but I think that’s what is on the other side. A linear road leading me to this veil. Through that doorway, the final freedom to bend and change and whisper on the winds. The expectation of completement, of one track progression, all the things I’ve bent and fit myself into over 4 decades. You do this, then this, then this, then this. Tick, tick, tick.
tick.
tick.
Standing on that high board, I open my eyes. Ready to dive.
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Imbolc, momentum and the clearing of the grey
It’s Imbolc and the 784 days of January are finally over. The flu has finally departed, aided by copious amounts of sleep, paracetamol and wonderful care packages from lovely friends. The endless blanket of grey cloud, damp, miserable and all-pervading has started to shift, with the wan sun peeking through and hope on the horizon.
Sleep, my goodness I have slept. But in winter, this hibernation, I tried not to fight it this year and am averaging a good 10 hours per night. I need it. Healing darkness, slow recovery, and expanding out into the January gloom. And as I slept, the world quietly moves on under my feet. The first sunny day for weeks and we finally ventured outside to the moors, faces turned to sunlight and surprise at bulbs breaking the surface. Whilst we’re still and resting, the world still turns.
The Hellebore is tentatively out, a few small flowers blooming amongst the stiff brown twigs of winter. Goldfinches pick through the mass of teasels. Teeny shoots of green poke up in random flowerpots. I can’t remember what grows in any of them and spring always brings a nice surprise! I can’t wait for that huge, heady, energetic rush of late spring. But for now, I sense that tipping point approaching. It’s still a season for rest. But seeds can be planted, physical or metaphorical. There is movement on the horizon, finally. And soon, summer!
There’s a sense of a shift as we potter about our daily lives. We’ve taken electricals to the local repair café to be fixed, we’ve painted and moved furniture and I’ve even started some university work I’ve been stuck on for 3 months. A bit of momentum building, maybe, after a year adrift. I’m not sure if 2025 was like that for everyone, speeding by so quickly it hardly registered as a full year. I think that pandemic processing is catching up. Things aren’t quite right yet, but there is hope they will be again.
The clouds reveal a glimpse of blue sky above. Spring is in the air!
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Enforced rest and smells of spring
This week I caught flu for the first time ever and have spent the week in some sort of virus-fuelled parallel universe. Kind of here, but not quite. Wrapped in blankets and accompanied by an emotional-support loo roll to blow my ever-streaming nose. Muscle aches and fatigue reminiscent of the worst days of ME/CFS, a place I never want to go back to. Now, it’s 9 days later and I feel a lot better, but am still totally wiped out, although I managed a very short blim down 50 metres of the canal today (via coffee of course) and also spotted my first ever Gooseanders, so worth the payback of the rest of the day on the sofa.
The new university term started this month and having had robust intentions of sectioning uni time and home time to give my brain some sort of a break, I started the new academic year by returning spectacularly and immediately to the overwork mindset and entirely forgetting any sort of clarity that I gained over the yuletide holiday regarding thinking, processing and general ‘making time for life’ enjoyment. Nope, I was straight back in to that all-consuming, relentless push to do absolutely everything at once, immediately, with no barrier or section in between. But this flu, now I’m somewhat back on this planet, gave me a bit of a break again to remember what I decided to try for myself just a few weeks ago.
So, now I’m feeling slightly better and aiming to get back into the swing of things next week (gently), I breathe out and try again. Stop working at a certain time, unless my brain is on a roll. Have a few little transitions to move from work to home – take my makeup off, have a shower, change clothes, sit outside. Compartmentalising work hours seems to be something I really need to do. I spend all evening picking up uni emails. I don’t need to do that. I’m not even employed. Academia takes a notoriously long time to get anything done, so why am I pushing myself to be always available?
I hate having things waiting that I can just get done quickly. I really, really hate having tasks hanging over me when I can clear them quickly. Even a few hours, trying to prioritise, there’s a push to just deal immediately with everything that I know is quick. Get it out of the way, then I don’t have to spend energy and brain trying to remember multiple things later on. I don’t have to re-gain that momentum a few hours afterwards. I don’t have to re-think about stuff, if I do it in the moment. So that’s why. But I’m tired of it. I forget to live. I forget to exist outside of academia. So maybe there’s another way. There needs to be something softer. The importance needs to be outside of it, not within it.
There is warmth in the sun, a little, this week. A reminder of those things that exist outside of that self-induced panic mode, and a slight warming of my virus-depleted soul, standing liquidly in a sunbeam, eyes closed, hand gripping the doorframe to keep upright. The birdsong is crisper, louder, and a slight scent of spring in the air. Although we have weeks to go yet, there’s a nudge towards brighter days. A pastel orange and pale green on the horizon at 5pm instead of all-consuming darkness. Catkins dangling joyously from hazel branches. Birch seeds pattering on the conservatory roof, loosened by goldfinches, falling to the thick, damp earth.
Today, though, a raincloud covers the valley, pattering fat drops to saturated ground, wrapping thick blankets of cloud around windows, branches and soul, cloying and grey. Houses disappear and that damp stillness pervades. A time of stillness. A time to rest and heal.
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Edges
There is a storm, raging wildly in the south. But here, we are tucked out of the way, sheltered by Pennines and just waiting on the fringes of the swirling cloud of the weather maps. Fat, soft, wet snow is falling quietly, not sticking enough to dull the sound of the main road, but enough to make a solid snowball, scooped from the ground in the dark before the temperature rises.
The breeze is calm, and those flakes heavy around the streetlights. I spot one or two people, who, like me, are framed in yellow window light, wrapped in a blanket, watching, just watching. Snow brings something magical, something primal, if only for a few hours. I watch the flakes fall and fall and fall.
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The long exhale
Solstice came and went, a little calm in the dead of night that December blackly embodies. Inky stillness, minute ticking past the next, thick, soupy darkness, yet the gradual inch forwards. In this all, in this silence, I deflated. The few weeks away from everything held me softly as I finally let go of the tightness barely carrying me through 2025. A long out breath. A muscle finally relaxed. Why now? I don’t know. But finally, finally. A welcome crumpling of the soul, floating on that liminality that always exists in these last few weeks.
Ice stills the world outside. No time for resolutions, this. Short days and frost, deep dark nights and waiting. To be and just exist, bare essence as the leafless tree branches, clear soul as the vast starry sky. How can we muster energy to resolve, at this time? Forcing brightness and momentum in the stillest part of the year. It is right to stop, and rest, and let that small, infinitesimal current carry us forward to brighter days. To consider but let things lie. To plod on earth crisp underfoot and trust that come spring, energy and vibrancy will rise once more.
I felt as though 2025 was tight around me. I did too much, building and chasing and trying to prove something to anyone and everyone around me. Finally, in this deep dark winter, something shifted. A block removed, a stone plopping into a pond, the soft thud of melting snow from a branch. Clarity. The softness to stop trying. A few weeks away from social media filling the days with colour so I remembered how real life is. Doing real things in real worlds, and even in the slowness of winter there are infinite layers of experience. I missed that. I don’t want to go back. I feel like I returned after a long time away, somehow. I breathe out, with the moon and the snow and the dark blue night. I breathe in with the diamond pinpricks of stars, with the icy ferns of jack frost as he spreads over the land, with the hint of oak and peep of tiny snowdrops above the dark earth.
I breathe out again, and wait, and float, and trust.
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Permagrey
Each morning the curtains open to a sky painted in a flat monotone, devoid of colour. Grey saturates the days, saturates my breath, my soul. Deep in December, the UK permagrey drains me slowly, steadily, a drip, drip, drip leaching energy, joy, enthusiasm. Day after day after day. They say we moan about the weather here, and it’s true, and honestly, it’s warranted. By the time January and February roll around, the 4 months of successional grey are taking their toll. A glimpse of blue sky sends people into a frenzy. In December, it’s just the beginning, and I’m already desaturated, melting into the pale miasma, where everything is still and dark and boring, and I am boring too.
I read cosy blogs and magazines about hunkering down. Layers of blankets and flickering candles. Dark at 2pm and mugs of hot chocolate. I read about how we should embrace these winter months, how we should be nesting and cosy and warm and full of winter cheer. I watch videos of how to love winter, how to be aesthetic, how to get out in the daylight and make the most of it. I buy candles and arrange them nicely and light them and appreciate their little glow against the all consuming darkness. I wrap up warm and go for a walk and look upwards and see skies usually hidden by summer leaves and then get a coffee and wrap my hands around it and think, oh, this is okay.
But still my soul yearns for summer. For a glimpse of light past early afternoon. For some warmth in the sun. For green leaves and bare feet. For the hum of insects in the background. The endless grey brings cold, damp tendrils into my bones and sets a chill that lasts to April. It’s a long wait. Winter is stasis, longing, muted, gaping. No matter how much I know that this darkness sows seeds to grow come spring, I am not at home in these months. I’m miserable, cold, glaring wishfully at the thin pale sun that only just manages to creep along the top of the garden fence at the height of the day, before falling off below the horizon once more.
I sleep and sleep and sleep. Limbs heavy and weary. Pulled to a sort of half-hibernation, stocked up on crumble and custard, trying to wait it out. Nothing seems so tempting as falling asleep for the next 4 months, awakening with the first scent of hyacinths and fat buzz of bumbles as they emerge looking for food. I could embrace that life quite easily, I think, as I glare balefully at the grey cloud that stretches to the horizon and beyond. Again.
There is beauty in the bare skeletons of the trees, to be sure. The wonder as Jack Frost paints glittering fractals across car roofs. That crisp, deep, inky blackness of a clear winter sky, stars pricked out in diamonds, eons in our eyesight. But I’m a summer child, born in that heady June rush of energy, the longest days and wide expanses of summertime. I need it like oxygen.
I tried to convince myself to be cosy. I tried to embrace the dark nights, the crisp walks, the candles. But forcing didn’t work. It’s okay to grumble at leaden skies. It’s okay to grump around and shiver and narrow my eyes at the weather forecast (spoiler: it’s going to be grey). It’s ok to dedicate an entire blog post to how much you hate winter. Come solstice, I’ll be raising two fingers to the dark half of the year and waiting impatiently for the lengthening days.
Bring on the summer. Eventually….
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Wind in the Chimney
The hollow howl buffeting down the stone chimney tells me the winds have arrived. Ripping the last leaves from thin branches, whipping shadows through the dark windows where moonlight flashes briefly from behind scudding clouds. I love the sound, that almost boom, the dull echo as the air rattles down through the fireplace, squeezing through the grates, whistling and wheezing. That wild energy finding its way into the old house, as always.
There is a background roar down the valley, too. In the inky darkness, that deep, primal rumble as the gale winds career from valley side to valley side, funnelled around slalom corners formed by the hillsides and hitting our house head on. Wild nights. I need this.
I find it easy to slip into that world of deadlines, of work, of the relentless rejection of the academic treadmill. Old habits die hard and patterns repeat, but I can hold myself now, with the help of those around me who remind me that real life isn’t hours on the screen or judgement by unseen peers. It’s this gale, it’s the rain battering the window, its that wild energy finding its way through every crack and hole in old stone. It’s been a hard week for sure, and I feel myself sinking, sleeping, hiding away. But in darkness is always softness, in these four walls is sanctuary, in the out breath is healing and peace and centring. As the gale rages outside, I remember to let that wild wind find its way to me, too.
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Letting Go Friday
The absolute bin truck of emails arriving in my inbox tell me it’s Black Friday today. Although, they have been arriving for weeks so I can forgive myself for thinking it had already happened last week, and wondering if time had managed to rewind itself in some sort of horrific endless consumerist loop.
Luckily, today is still today. And prompted by the absolute excessive shouting to buy more or be more, I felt a need to sit quietly, with the rain lashing the windows outside, and to begin to let go of something, in a tiny, freeing protest.
That something ended up being my Bluesky accounts and a large percentage of Instagram follows. I felt a little jolt, a small renewal, to slip away from who the unnamed algorithm currently thinks I am and to start afresh. I can be whoever I want, as I click unfollow on lists after lists of accounts all very, very similar to each other, and that didn’t stand out in my memory. It’s quite fun gaming the algorithm. You can reinvent yourself every few months.
Over two accounts I culled 600 follows. I didn’t expect to feel so light, so happy, so free. Then, there was nothing to check, no new updates, no new stories (my downfall). So I made another cup of tea and stood outside and breathed real air in between the rain showers.
I thought as well of other things I can let go of, other things to breathe out into that icy air and let the wild winds carry away. For me, it’s been a time of endings and recalibrations in life recently. Big, identity-forming roles have finished terms, and the future is calling in a way that is dragging me forward, forcing shifts, different thinking, leaving comfort behind for brand-new possibilities. All with that undercurrent of fear, but a slight excitement, too. In all this, realisations peel away. People, places, parts of self – it’s time to say thank you for what they have served me with, and step on boldy without them. Who thought that clicking a button on social media a few hundred times would lead to something more.
It’s not that I can decide ‘right, it’s time to change’ and suddenly be a whole new person. Life just happens and we ride through it as best we can, and maybe in a few years, or ten, or twenty, we can look back and say oh, wow, I have changed since then. I learned. I experienced new knowing. I am still me, but ‘me’ doesn’t always to be static. For me, it feels like I add layers, shed layers, connect layers. Everything at once, through time and space.
But even if we can’t put our finger on specifics, I think we are aware of times of change. When something bigger is shifting. We may not know how or why, or what is on the other side, but I think we know when to listen to those signs beyond our explanation.
As winter draws closer, it’s a good time for a bit of pruning. To uncover bare bones and see what grows come spring.
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Deep fear and feeling
Wrapped in four different blankets, my hoodie pulled up over my thinning hair, I feel the thud thud thud of my heart deep within. Pumping oxygen to muscles primed to fight or flight, the whisper of shallow breath cooling my lips, pupils expanding in the dim light. But tonight is relaxed, a soft end to a weekend, a day off the following day, a cocoon of ambient lighting, deep bass, tea and company. Yet this insidious, deep, ever-present fear underlines every moment. Snaking its way up through my throat, a long, shaky exhale not enough to disperse the cortisol that’s been flooding this body for as long as I can remember.
Rationally, I don’t know what it is. That constant fear that I am In Trouble, that somehow I will get Found Out, but honestly, what for, I have no idea. For being wrong. For not being enough. For existing. For all this and more, the things I can’t put into words, things that are at most a fleeting sound, a glimpse, a shadow in the back of my mind. All the things that spoke truth to me, whilst I switched myself into whoever I was talking to at the time. A way to protect something that I have no name for.
Weirdly, the more I make peace with myself, the more this feeling seems to rise and start to stick around. I’m feeling the most confident, the most at peace that I have felt, maybe ever. And yet, simultaneously, I feel the most fear, too. The more I relax into myself, the more this thing inside me twists and turns and raises terror that has me screaming in my sleep. What is it, this deep fear? Am I creating space for it, the more I let go?
I think it needs to come out, whatever this anxiety is. It needs to be felt. This journey of final understanding, four decades in the making, has pushed and squashed fear down, leaving an underlying dread that coloured my days but that I thought was normal. I ignored it, I didn’t want to pay it attention. Now, letting go, expanding into myself, colouring in blankness, peeling back layers, existing in a sort of lightness – there is more space to hear. Bubbles rise to the surface, things long buried, things shouting to be heard. And so I let it expand, this deep fear, this beating heart. Monsters that chase me at night, a world that’s louder than I remember, an awareness that is highly alert for danger, for judgement, for discovery. I need to feel it, I know it. As unpleasant as it is, I think the smallness of life right now is a step forward.
My world has shrunk, as I’ve said before. But this time it is my world, and I’m real, and true, and tentative. This deep fear is keeping me small, and at the same time, keeping me safe. This shiny new me, uncovered, a small smile playing on lips, a new lightness of step. It has a purpose, and it deserves to be felt in all the panic, all the wide eyes and racing mind. The shaking hands, the deep, inexplicable terror. It hurts and it heals, little by little.
So, with curiosity, trepidation, and honestly a little resignation, I walk alongside the fear. To hear what was underneath all these years, to begin to understand and then to let it go. In all is waves. In all is a cycle. Seasons rise and fall, and this will fall too, in time.
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In all things
Samhain approaches, that time of held breath, liminality, not quite here but not quite there, either. A time where it is said that movement is easier between worlds, where permeability reigns, fluid, soft, grasping. Timeweavers dance across realities, journeys start and end from both sides of the veil. For those who listen, for those who speak a language that is never heard, for those who tiptoe into the night.
I think a lot about balance this time of year. Where everything has seemed either/or, it is now blurred. Surety is shifting and my mind feels it stronger than ever. For a brain where everything smudges together all of the time, coloured by layers of possibility and thumbprints scattered across synapses, this time of year is a time where I feel myself melt into the season, into the landscape. Into the energies that have carried me along this far.
I try and strive for balance, but balance is effort. It takes planning, muscle, tension to exist on that thin line between too much and not enough. Between light and dark. In the long, looping cycles of life, balance is always off. Save for a few pinpoints hit, in my experience, entirely by accident, I am always pulled one way or another. Immersed in joy, or immersed in apathy, or all of the minute divisions in between. Feeling each moment in my universe soul, with all parts of my being, beginning, end and the times that have no measure. Why should we strive to counter moments with their opposites? Why is the goal a perfect symmetry of experience?
The cycle of the year waxes and wanes with regularity, and I see the balance in light and dark, in summer and winter, in the eternal battle between oak and holly. But what for those who walk one side or the other? For those who are pulled by the deep, relentless energy of everything, everywhere. There is not just this, or that, or a perfect divide. Minds are messy, lives are messy. And mess is wonderful, relentless, and full of potential.
I’m embracing mess and the possibility that ‘unbalance’ is where I naturally come to rest. A mix of quiet and stimulation hasn’t really worked out for me. In fact, my mental rest is in doing, in movement, in beats and thrums. My brain sings to itself, and when left in silence creates its own relentless cacophony of colour, of half formed thoughts, feelings, glimpses and fizzing connection, as those who also belong to the tribe called ADHD will well attest. This year has brought introspection. It’s taken a while for things to settle but this year seems to have been the year of ‘what if’? And so, in celebration of this lightness of spirit, of this curiosity, just maybe, although the earth turns steadily, I entertain the idea of humming to a different frequency. A kind of weighted balance, one side rising higher than the other. Do I need to bring more balance into my life – or do I actually need less?
I’ve tried to incorporate more down-time this year, as university pressure mounts and my workload increases. But as much as I’ve embraced rest, internet-free time and stillness, I’ve not found myself feeling better. In fact, what seems to be helping is accepting the vibrancy that doing brings. I’m realising it’s not a balance between busyness and rest that helps me process and restore. It’s busyness…. and more busyness. Busyness in a different form. Tactile movement, creating, foraging, walking, making. Moving. Learning. Testing out just how much additional stimulation this ADHD brain needs to function optimally, and finding fun ways to embrace that. I’ve spent the last decade consciously making myself stop, slow, think and rest, sometimes forced by illness, sometimes in choice. A time of stillness to facilitate that deep, deep soul processing, and I needed it, viscerally, truly. Now I’m at a place where experimentation seems more achievable. And so, as the nights draw in, I feel this is actually a time for more. Where I’d usually be turning to hibernation, I feel drawn to exploration, instead. More, but different. Let’s see where it leads.