We may do it consciously or unconsciously, but there’s something about a new year that encourages reflection. All those things that have passed and happened in the year before. Or all the years before. Everything we hope for this next year.
It’s kind of arbitrary timing, turning over from December to January (although it was wonderfully symmetrical this year, beginning a new year on a Monday, wasn’t it?). Reflection, after all, can happen at any time—and probably should, if we want to make real progress toward our goals and personal growth.
January is also the month of my birthday, when I start thinking, What exactly have I done in the last year? Other questions follow. Have I been intentional? Did I meet my goals? How many? (Definitely not all of them. But that’s okay, I tell myself. They’re goals, something you work toward.)
And perhaps the biggest question: What can I do differently in the next year, using what I learned last year?
And there it is—reflection.
During this reflection time, I have to remind myself, often, that I’m a work in progress. We all are. A work in progress isn’t perfect. So we can’t expect perfection of ourselves (or others, as it happens).
There are things I want to get better at—things I’ve wanted to get better at for years (and no, it’s not knowing where to place prepositions to speak and write properly. I already know that. I just break the rules). Maybe I’m making progress toward these self-improvement goals…but how do we really know unless we look at things honestly and evaluate?
What have I done? Well, maybe I didn’t write as much; I finished fewer drafts last year than I have in previous years. But I visited several schools and had some great conversations with students and made some new friends. And I published some books. And I did finish drafts—several. I hung out with my family and my kids and their friends. I wrote some notes, encouraged people, helped out where I could.
I’m beginning to learn that what matters more than what we’ve done is the mark we’ve made. What have we left behind us?
I’d like to change my question “What exactly have I done” to “How has what I did this year made the world better?” It’s a perspective of purpose.
I want to make the world better. I want to make people think and believe in the magnificence of their whole selves. It may not shift the world in a dramatic, easily quantifiable way, but someone somewhere might be changed by one of my books or words I share or an encounter with me. And a little bit goes a long way, doesn’t it?
We don’t always see the full impact of our work and our existence. So much of what we do and the marks we make happen underground. We plant seeds or we water seeds or we clear the ground for a seed to be planted later. Our marks aren’t always obvious.
As I make my goals for the new year, I try to remember they can shift, much like I hope to do throughout the year. What’s important now may not be important in six months. I’m not the most flexible person, and I want to work on that. Sometimes that’s the way to make the world better, too: realize we’re not done growing and learning and changing, too.
I hope I’ve done work that has made the world better. I also hope it’s made humanity better. And me better. I may not be able to measure whether my work has made its mark or how spectacular a mark it’s made.
But maybe it’s enough to know, for all of us to know, that we’ve done our part—ushered good books into the world, impacted children—our own or others—and influenced the circle of people in our care.
Let’s keep doing our little bit.
Have a magical month of making your mark.
Some things to remember when reflecting on your year:
1. We’ve come a long way.
It’s easy to discount how far we’ve come when we feel we should have done more in a year…or five years…or ten…
But don’t forget to look at what you have done and how you’ve grown. I may not have written as many drafts in 2023 as I did in 2022—but I wrote several. And that’s something to celebrate.
Even one step forward is progress. Keep moving.
2. We have a long way to go.
A year is a long time (well, theoretically…my years seem to fly by now). We have another wide-open opportunity to grow and change.
I don’t want to be stagnant. I want to understand that I don’t know everything—not even half of it. I want to learn all I can and listen all I can.
All of life is an opportunity to become ourselves. Remember: We’re works in progress and always will be. Never stop growing.
3. A blank slate is available any time we need it.
It’s easy to use a new year as that time for change and reflection—but the truth is, we can do that at any point of the year. The beginning of a quarter or the beginning of a month, the beginning of a week, the beginning of a day. Reflection is a state of mind.
We can create our own blank slate any time we need it.
I write all kinds of books, but my favorites include books for children and teens. I spend the bulk of my time writing those. And some people like to know why.
There are several reasons. But one of the biggest is to “lift as I climb,” as poet Angela Davis says. (The actual quote is, “We must learn to lift as we climb.”)
I put a lot of myself into my books for children and teens. I try to bravely (and sometimes not-so-bravely) explore childhood experiences and traumas, which, in my eyes, has a dual purpose: It helps the child in me process through them and it also, I hope, lifts other children out of the dark places I’ve been. Helps them feel less alone. Shows them a way out. Reminds them that what’s going on in their lives is not their fault.
I hope they realize all of those things sooner than I did.
Although I believe therapy is beneficial to everyone, if only to give us a sense of being deeply listened to—which can’t be underestimated—I often tell people if I can save children and teens from the years of intense therapy I’ve had to undergo to (sometimes) believe I’m magnificent, I’ll pour all my secrets out.
Well, I’m not sure about all my secrets—but at least the ones I’m moved to share because of the lives and wellbeing of my readers.
I always like to think of this as a kind of generosity. One of my family’s values is to be generous—with our time, with our resources (whenever possible), with ourselves, with our hearts, with words, with kindness, with love. My husband and I have tried to teach our sons that.
Generosity is good for others, of course, but it’s also good for us. Studies show it reduces stress and boosts our physical health. It fosters joy and helps us hold tight to our sense of purpose. It combats depression. And guess what else? It increases our lifespan. Generous people live longer.
Studies also show it deepens our social connection and improves our relationships. And it makes us feel better about ourselves. When someone benefits from our generosity, it’s practically impossible to see ourselves as worthless.
When I think about generosity, I naturally think about money. But that’s not the only way to be generous and give to others. Generosity can also look like inviting the couple down the road to a dinner at our house, because they don’t seem to have much family around and this time of year is hard when we don’t have family around. It can look like spending a few extra minutes mowing the neighbor’s yard because they’re getting older and don’t have much time and energy to do it. It can look like spending a few extra minutes chatting with a parent in the pickup line and getting beyond the surface-level conversation, down to something deeper and more meaningful.
Talk to the homeless on the streets of your city. Bake some holiday treats to share. Donate things you don’t need anymore. Be generous in your attitudes and assumptions about others.
You can be as creative with your generosity as you want to be.
And here’s the thing, too: We should accept the generosity of others. This is often hard for us (or at least for me). But if we don’t accept another’s generosity or we say, “You don’t have to do that” or we minimize it, we rob them of the joy of giving. Accepting someone’s generosity can be a form of generosity, too.
Every year, starting the Friday after Thanksgiving, my family reads together A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens—one of the best books about the power of generosity, as Scrooge moves from miserly to generous. We uphold this tradition, because I want my sons to know what it means to be generous. I want to build in them, in me, in all of us, a practice of generosity—not so it’s a one-time, once-a-year thing but so we do it all the time. I want my sons to understand that “generous” is a way of being and existing in the world.
And I hope I lead them by example. I hope we all do.
May you have a beautiful month of choosing generosity.
What are some ways you can be generous in your daily life?
Here are some of my favorite generous practices (that don’t require money—or much, anyway):
1. Be there for someone.
My sons get chatty every so often, usually in the car. My brain is such that I often have a million things going on at once—to-do lists scrolling like a Star Wars intro, worries humming along in the background, stories begging for attention. My sons don’t always talk about important things—at least, not important things to me.
But offering them undivided attention is generous. Offering anyone our undivided attention in a world that tries to steal our attention everywhere, at every turn, is generous. During gatherings with friends and family, put phones away and focus on the conversation. Everyone feels loved when they’re listened to, and all it takes is a little time.
Related to that, be generous with your words. Compliment, encourage, leave positive reviews, be kind online. Talking to people without judging is generous. Showing them mercy and forgiveness and love is generous. We could use a lot more of that in our world.
2. Volunteer your time or expertise.
Choose an organization you care about and donate your time to them. Offer your services for free. Give something away. Teach a valuable skill to someone, or give away some of your knowledge. Spend time with people in need.
When I go downtown in my city, I try to engage with at least one homeless person. They don’t get many people who look them in the eyes, you know? I want them to know they still have dignity and worth. I want them to know they’re still worth being loved and listened to. And their stories are heartbreaking and illuminating.
Listening and empathizing feels generous to me.
3. “Random” (but intentional) acts of kindness.
Deliver cookies to a neighbor. Write a letter to a grandparent. Cook a meal for someone. Offer to babysit for a couple with young children. Let someone merge, send a care package, pick up trash in your neighborhood during your walk.
And be generous with your attitude, extending thank yous and appreciation for people. Send someone a text to let them know how much you’re grateful for their presence in your life.
There are lots of ways to be generous. We’re all in this together, and we all deserve the best in life. Let’s remember that we all belong to each other, and generosity will come easy for us.
Nearly every weekday morning, I log onto zoom, where I meet with a group of authors to first write and then discuss our writing time or whatever’s going on in our lives.
Recently, we’ve begun adding a time of naming our gratitude, before diving into talks about the writing we did in that 1.5-hour slot.
My sons and I call the little “I’m-gratefuls” thankfuls. Every Thanksgiving season, when they were younger, we’d search the wilderness behind our house for the perfect discarded branch, which we’d place in a terra cotta pot and surround with marbles to hold it in place. We’d pin our own paper leaves onto it—each leaf scrawled with one of our thankfuls. We’d bring a dying branch back to life and fill it with color, gratitude, and hope.
Gratitude can turn whole gloomy days around. It can change our attitude. It can help us see more clearly.
Sōkō Morinaga, a Japanese Buddhist spiritual teacher, says, “If you all just let the scales drop from your eyes, you realize that everything everywhere is filled with truth…everything everywhere is to be appreciated.”
Sometimes we have scales covering our eyes. We’ve been through a hard time, we’ve seen some disappointments. Our vision gets a little clouded when all we seem to experience is frustration, sadness, fear, anger, trial and tribulation. The dark gets darker, and the light gets dimmer.
And add to that mental illnesses like Major Depressive Disorder and anxiety disorders and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and the host of others that can make light so very hard to see.
I’m not one to say that gratitude solves everything. If you’ve been around me long enough, you’ve probably picked up on how much I believe in therapy, how much I want to see everyone, no matter their economic situation, have access to proper mental health care. When I’m in the midst of my depression, gratitude becomes rote. Something I do. Maybe it makes the dark days a little less dark, but it certainly doesn’t take them away.
It is a tool we can use, though.
Lately I’ve found myself using gratitude on my children more and more—like I used to do when they were little.
Three of the six are teenagers. Life is tough for teenagers. Puberty, school demands, trying to figure out who they are and what they can contribute to the world. It’s a lot to balance emotionally. A couple of my sons focus more on what’s fair (and especially what’s not) than what’s good.
I know what it’s like to focus on what’s not fair. I get caught there occasionally in my life, still. If only I hadn’t experienced this trauma as a 12-year-old. If only I’d grown up with a family that had money. If only I’d gotten these educational opportunities…
The list can go on and on and on if I let it.
Gratitude helps peel from our eyes the scales that sink into place when we’re too caught up in the if-onlys.
I know as well as anyone how difficult it is to see past the scales. This time of year is especially hard for me. I’m making pies and treats for my family, but my relationship with food has always been shaky—really, it’s a relationship with my body.
If only I hadn’t grown up with a person in my life who criticized the way I looked…
(It’s much more complicated than that, of course.)
Times like these I fall into self-deprecation. I don’t like my body. I wish I could be different. I wish I didn’t get so overwhelmed all the time. I wish I could be a better mother. I wish…
But if everything everywhere is to be appreciated and everything everywhere is filled with truth, what does that mean? I got out for a run—the air, the trees, time is filled with truth. I sit down to dinner with my family—the room is filled with truth. I meditate in my room while my husband noodles on the piano downstairs—the entire house, music, love is filled with truth.
The solar eclipse is filled with truth…my kids’ shoes all over the floor—filled with truth…the music of our lives, filled with truth.
Here’s the truth I glean from my life when I see with the right kind of eyes:
1. I am loved. 2. I am magnificent just the way I am. 3. Everyone has bad days or needs some extra help sometimes—I’m not alone.
Everything everywhere is to be appreciated—the good days and the bad days. The dark and the light. The disappointing and the victorious.
Every time one of my sons celebrates a birthday we end the day gathered around our table (and a homemade cake), telling the birthday boy why we’re grateful for him. And he has to list however many thankfuls correspond to his age—so it gets more and more challenging as the years march on.
But I hope, by doing this simple ritual, they’re learning to see the good everywhere. I hope they’re learning to focus on what they have instead of what they don’t have. I hope they’re learning to peel the scales from their eyes and see the world clearly.
There are days I definitely don’t feel like being grateful. It wasn’t a productive writing day, a project is giving me trouble, I’m just down in the dumps, no explanation necessary. Gratitude helps turn my attitude around. It reminds me that this is a blip, nothing lasts forever, and sometimes that can be a good thing. Maybe it sounds Pollyanna-ish, finding the silver lining in all the bad. But if it makes us happier? If it helps us recognize the good in our lives? If it changes the way we see? Why not try?
It won’t solve everything, but practicing gratitude will remind you what you have: People who love you; a mind and body that work wonders for you, no matter what it looks like; a future filled with hope and magnificence.
I hope you have a marvelous month of appreciation.
Here are some of my favorite ways to incorporate gratitude in life:
1. Meditate on gratitude.
I know I’ve mentioned it before, but Apple Fitness+ has some fantastic gratitude meditations, from five minutes to 20. I highly recommend practicing them.
When we focus our minds on gratitude and clear away other distractions for even five minutes, we flex the muscle of gratitude. We stretch it longer and make it stronger. And the more we do that, the better at it we get.
2. Keep a gratitude journal.
At the end of every day I record in my schedule three things I’m grateful for. They can be as small as finding a pen that still had ink in it when I got an idea I didn’t want to lose to as big as “I had a great conversation with the 14-year-old about friendship and love.”
This is yet another way of building the muscle of gratitude. Oftentimes we’re so busy in the midst of a day that we don’t even think about these things we’re grateful for; it’s only in looking back that we clearly see how much we have.
3. Share your appreciation with others in your life.
Write notes of appreciation or send a text or call to tell someone in your life how much you value and appreciate them. Gratitude can be shared…in fact, sometimes sharing it has a multiplication effect. Think how you feel when someone shares their appreciation for you. You want to pass that feeling along. Imagine if we all did that, spread rings of positivity into the world. It would be a world of light. And that would be a beautiful thing.
“Do you think it’s becoming a problem again?” he said.
No. But yes. Maybe. Probably. No.
Thus began my husband’s gentle reminder not to fall into my self-destructive patterns.
We celebrate twenty years of marriage this month. He’s known me more than half my life. There’s not much I can hide from him. It’s like having eyeballs on the inside, sorting through all your secrets.
He recognizes the signs when I start slipping back into disordered eating and getting tripped up by body dysmorphia.
My depression of late has felt a little…wild. Seasons come and seasons go, some longer than others. Some have deeper waters than others. Some spiral out of control.
When things are out of control, I spiral (just like the depression). When I spiral I grasp for control of anything and everything. Most things can’t be controlled, so they slide right through my hands.
Not everything slides, though. What I always convince myself I can control is diet and exercise. I’ll fast for longer, I tell myself. It’s a healthy form of eating, a buzz word in today’s culture (conveniently). I’ll exercise more. I’m doing something good for myself. I’m not doing anything wrong.
My eyes and heart and mind sweep right over the problem, pretending it doesn’t exist. And therein lies the problem.
I know where things can go from here. I’ve lived that story.
So maybe I acknowledge the problem and maybe I don’t, but the reality is, it’s always there, staring me right in the face. Reminding me that this is yet another personal failure.
What a dirty phrase: personal failure.
The people closest to me know I’m hard on myself. My self-talk isn’t always productive. I’m a hopeful person who avoids hoping for the good things I want and desire—because it’s easier and better for my heart not to be disappointed when those things don’t happen. I don’t always practice mercy on myself when I make a mistake.
Maybe this is why I’ve always loved the journals of Sylvia Plath. She was hard on herself, too. And her self-talk was unproductive a lot of the time. And she hoped only tentatively. Mercy was a foreign concept when applied to herself.
I’ve revisited these journals multiple times over the years, ever since my mom gifted me with them for Christmas when I was in high school. And in the last two years I’ve been revisiting them because I’ve been writing a biography in verse about her last years in high school and her years at Smith College in Massachusetts.
We’re so similar I almost feel like I’m writing about my own years of young adulthood. Up down up down moods, one moment feeling like I’m good at what I do, the next feeling like I’m quite possibly the worst writer who ever lived.
And then there are the mistakes.
I’ve made a lot of them in my life. I’ve tried to forget them as well as I can (but you never really do, do you?), because for a long time, it felt like my mistakes said something about me. They were personal failures. Evidence that I was broken. Incapable. Wrong.
Sometimes they still feel like that.
Viewing mistakes like this kept me—sometimes still keeps me—from examining my weaknesses. It keeps me ignoring my problems. Pretending they don’t exist but are simply things I can’t fix.
That doesn’t solve anything, though. As Margaret Haffernan, an entrepreneur in the UK, says, “You cannot fix a problem you refuse to acknowledge.”
We can’t fix problems we sweep under the bed, hide to our best ability, ignore like if we ignore them long enough they’ll go away. Problems are sticky. They hang around. And they don’t shrink, they grow when they don’t get the attention they think they deserve.
After my husband asked me that gentle, pointed question; after I saw that I was, indeed, headed toward that dangerous road again; after I metaphorically collapsed around another personal failure, another mistake, a voice came from somewhere down deep. Mistakes aren’t who you are, it said. The voice sounded just like me.
That’s because I’m constantly telling my kids this. Mistakes are just mistakes, I tell them. Opportunities to grow. They can be fixed. They aren’t who we are.
I hadn’t been listening to what I knew.
How can we fix something we refuse to see or acknowledge? We can’t. That goes for mistakes, and problems.
I’m still a work in progress. I’m still learning not to expect perfection in myself. Some days are better than others.
Problems aren’t fixed once and for all. Like anything else, they require a journey. Some problems may take our whole lifetimes to solve. We may slip and slide backward and forward along the path of recovery and healing.
But here’s what we can know, too: We’re stronger than we know. We are capable of great things. We can face any riptide that comes.
And maybe that’s the part that matters most.
Have a glorious month of seeing with wide-open eyes and realizing your inner strength.
Here are some suggestions for rooting out problems from their hiding places:
1. Identify.
Finding problem areas we’ve ignored or hidden or shoved under our bed can seem like a monumental task. But it’s the first step in the process of fixing those problems. So we need to pull everything out, dust off the boxes, shake out the rugs, and brave the spiders that may have nested while we were so busy trying to ignore them.
I might have taken that metaphor too far. Forgive me.
If you need a place to start, try your frequent frustrations. Our frustrations can tell us a lot about our problem areas. One of mine (simpler than the one mentioned above)? Clothes left on the floor! This is both my children’s problem and mine. They should pick up their clothes, I should stop pining after a perfectly tidy house and remember that living with people means accommodating their personalities and tendencies (while still communicating my own needs for a mostly-tidy house). Compromise is the language of roommates—and families.
2. Acknowledge.
I’ve found in my life that some of the most powerful words we can say are, “I acknowledge this is a problem.” It brings with it a great relief—sometimes to the person pointing out one of our problem areas, sometimes just to ourselves when we’ve ignored a problem for so long it also, ironically, seems to be the only thing we think about in the backs of our minds. (Who knows how that’s possible, but it is.)
3. Make a plan.
This is probably my favorite part of the process. I don’t necessarily relish identifying or acknowledging problem areas, but I am all about the plan. I will plan in minute detail. Meal plans that will make sure I’m eating. Fitness plans that will protect me from taking my workouts to an extreme. Therapy plans that get me the psychological care I need.
Make a plan to address and fix your problem(s), one step at a time. And remember it won’t be solved all at once. You’re a work in progress. We all are. So let’s be gentle on ourselves and practice a little mercy.
When I was four, my family lived right across the street from the red-roofed elementary school where I watched my brother get swallowed by the white doors every morning. I couldn’t understand why he got to go to kindergarten and I didn’t. Who cared about being five? They should let anybody in who wanted to learn!
I made my brother teach me what he’d learned as soon as he came back home. So I learned to read right alongside him—and oh, what a world I discovered when I picked up books!
My love of learning continued all through middle school and high school. I set my sights on college—because I didn’t want to stop learning. And even though I did not come from a family of college graduates or even a family that could afford college, I worked hard for that dream.
An even bigger world opened up for me in college. I’d grown up in a small town. College exposed me to different people and different viewpoints and the amazing (and sometimes scary) reality that I hardly knew anything—and nothing for certain.
It was both a humbling and an exciting revelation. Humbling because it’s always a little jarring when you’re faced with how little you actually know. And exciting because it meant I could forge within myself a space for constant growth and learning. I could entertain my wonder. I could explore my uncertainties.
Maybe we don’t always like asking questions out loud, where people can hear, where our ignorance feels like it’s on display. People aren’t always kind and patient with our questions. Sometimes it feels like we live in a world where everybody knows the for-sure answer except for us.
But a question I’ve always asked myself is, What if there are no for-sure answers? And another: What if those of us who pretend to be so certain (and make no mistake—I pretend sometimes, too) are really some of the most uncertain people among us?
Can we know anything for certain?
I’m not talking about our convictions, where we take a hard stance and are unwilling to compromise. My 14-year-old pointed out one of mine the other day. He said, “You know, you’re really open-minded about a lot of things, but when it comes to food and healthy eating, you’re, like, unbendable.”
I made some joke and then followed it up with something like, “I’m unbendable because it’s one of the things that are important to me. Like climate change. And women’s rights. And a lot of other social issues.”
It’s good to have those convictions and hard stances. But even within those, we have to be willing to learn more. I have rigid rules about the food in our house being healthy and mostly plants. It doesn’t mean I’m not open to hearing new information about nutrition. In fact, I actively seek out new information and have since I studied nutrition in college. Science changes. I change with it when I need to.
Being rigid about our convictions doesn’t have to mean we’re closed-minded.
When we remain open-minded, we allow ourselves to consider and accept new information. We seek to clarify. We ask important questions without fear. We wonder. And along the way, we learn that the more we learn the less we actually know.
Which is why it’s important to embrace an attitude of learning.
I love what William Least Heat-Moon, an American writer and historian, said: “Maybe the only gift is a chance to inquire, to know nothing for certain. An inheritance of wonder and nothing more.”
And Octavia Butler, another American writer, says, “I don’t know very much. None of us knows very much. But we can all learn more.”
Failure is a good learning opportunity. So is struggle. And joy. And disappointment. And hurt. And…
You get it. Life is a learning opportunity. But we must remain open to learn from it. We can spend our whole lives just existing. Going through the motions. Making the same mistakes again and again and never even noticing room for improvement.
I want to learn as much as I can about the world and its people and history and the present and the imagined future. I want to learn how I fit into the fabric of that past and present and future. I want to learn what I can do to make it a more beautiful place for everyone.
Wonder is good at doing that.
Have a beautiful month full of wonder, new ideas, and learning opportunities.
Here are my favorite ways to learn from life:
1. Let yourself feel what you feel. Then learn.
When my sons are flooded with emotions after an altercation or a disappointment or an experience that upset them in some way, there is no room for immediate learning. When the body and brain are flooded with emotions, that’s all we can consider. We don’t have capacity for learning.
So I have to wait until the strong feelings pass to talk to them and teach.
It’s the same in our own lives. When an experience leaves us flooded with an emotion—fear or hurt or embarrassment at misspeaking, we aren’t ready for learning. But feelings pass. So when the emotions have calmed, we can consider what we might learn from our experience. (And guess what’s great at helping us learn? Journaling!)
2. Read widely.
As if I really need to tell you this. But I often remind my kids: the more you read, the more you know. Maybe you won’t know everything and maybe you won’t know anything for certain (still), but reading exposes you to a wealth of information. Books, magazines, newspapers, comic strips, anything you can get your hands on—read it! When you read about the experiences from the viewpoints of other people, especially people who are different from you, it will open your mind to new information. What an exciting possibility!
3. Listen to other people.
Reading is a form of “listening” to other people. But listen, too, to the people around you. Seek out other viewpoints. Try to understand those who differ from you (this is work I’m trying to do as well…and it has been some of the hardest work I’ve done in my life).
When I was a journalist, I had to interview all kinds of people. People whose beliefs made me bristle. (Once I had to report on a KKK rally in Austin. It was very difficult to stomach.) People whose stories opened my eyes to new ways of thinking and being. People who challenged me and angered me and delighted me and frustrated me. And at the end of the day I had to write a balanced story as though I was an objective observer of life, not an opinionated participant in it. It was good practice for the listening I’d need to do to maintain an attitude of learning.
Listen without judgment. Absorb people’s stories and knowledge. Weigh them against your own. Think for yourself, but don’t think in a vacuum.
Before every encounter with a person (especially the difficult ones) ask yourself, what might I learn from them?
It’s a question that can change the world, I think.
We’ve reached that time of the summer where my kids are at each other’s throats, everyone is growing tired of the family togetherness, and the oppressive heat of Texas is wearing our patience thin.
And my emotional wellbeing begins to slip.
I call this time the “summertime sadness.”
It’s more than just the title of a Lana del Rey song, though. For those of us who wrestle with Major Depressive Disorder, seasons of sadness are a real thing. Summertime is one of those seasons for me.
Knowing this about myself, I took what precautions I could. Even though my latest book released at the beginning of the summer, I made sure I scheduled some renewal time between my in-person events, for rest and reflection and time spent with the people I love. I scheduled more therapy sessions. I doubled up on my journaling practice.
And yet, depression still found me.
It’s a persistent illness that frequently reminds me I can take all the necessary precautions, structure everything just so, prepare myself for its eventual visitation and even still it will surprise me.
This time it snuck up on me while I laughed and played some improv games with my kids. One minute we were playing “Alphabet,” the next a pain gripped my chest and (metaphorically) shook me.
This won’t last forever, it said. Time is running out. Have you done enough?
That little standoff with time was all it took to send me spiraling into a whirlpool of questions.
Why do you work so hard? What’s it all for? What have you really done, besides waste time you could have spent watching your kids grow up? Who cares about your stories, really? What about your kids?
I’m well acquainted with these questions. They plague me at the most inconvenient of times. It’s one of the results of living as an ambitious woman in a still-patriarchal society, growing up and coming of age in a religion that calls me a helper, not a leader.
So in some ways, I expect the questions, usually around the time I feel depression creeping in. It’s unclear why it happens…maybe I’m too exhausted to put my guard up and combat the messages I’ve internalized. It’s exhausting being a woman.
What I didn’t expect was for the questions to turn into definitive statements that bludgeoned me every single time I opened up my notebook to write.
You’re wasting your time. No one cares what you have to say. You’re sacrificing your kids for stories no one reads, books that don’t matter. You’re selfish. Get a life. Do yourself a favor and quit. You only have one life, and it’s flying by.
On and on and on it went.
I could scarcely write a thing.
Maybe I need a break, I thought. I took a week off. I read and watched movies with my kids and baked two treats with two kids instead of one.
The summertime sadness was worse than ever. The voices came back louder and crueler. They called me names. They repeated all those definitive statements I’d already heard. They added more.
Mordechai Anielewicz, a Polish activist, once said, “The most difficult struggle of all is the one within ourselves.” I’ve found that to be true in my own life.
Our struggles show themselves in depression and anxiety and OCD and a negative and critical inner voice and in so many other ways. They’re heavy. They can weigh us down. It’s hard to crawl, let alone walk, when we’re carrying so much on our shoulders—not just our own mental health struggles but also the burdens of our children, our partners, our friends, our family, the world. How does anyone escape the summertime sadness?
For some of us it’s different. It’s not a sadness, per se. The struggle within ourselves looks like lack of focus or lost hope or saying yes to too many things or forgetting to treat our enemies with love and respect or losing belief in ourselves or failing at work/life balance. Maybe we all struggle with all those things. At any time in our lives we’re faced with any number of internal struggles. And usually, just when we sort of figure one out another comes knocking.
We face so much internal resistance. It’s a wonder we manage to do anything worthwhile.
Sometimes we just have to embrace the struggle. Know it will pass. Have faith that we will come out on the other side not only still standing but standing a teeny little bit stronger.
I’ve begun listening to the arguments in my house, and instead of immediately sighing and thinking, I really can’t take this anymore, I think, They’re learning to express themselves, and I get to teach them how to resolve conflict respectfully. The family togetherness may feel stifling at times, but it’s a chance to connect in small ways, and we’re all learning what we need and what we can handle. I’ve begun accepting the triple-digit heat, instead of wishing it away.
And as for the critical voice, well, she’s not quite as loud when I argue with her.
No one needs your stories, she says.
I do, I say.
And I try to remember that someone else put that negative, critical voice inside me—and it’s the constant work of therapy that will extract it.
The most difficult struggle we have is within ourselves: the internal battle to be who we are. To do what we were made to do. Or maybe simply to survive the summertime sadness.
We’re living a story; what kind of story do we want it to be? I know my answer to the question.
Have a victorious month of slaying your internal struggles.
Things that can help when we’re internally struggling:
1. Assess
Journaling can be a great way to assess our internal voices and track down their origins and search for some perspective. But if you’re not a journaler, try some other form of assessment—taking out a blank sheet of paper and listing all the negative voices you hear and tracing them down a timeline or connecting them to the people (or situations) you remember hurting you in real life.
Sometimes we pick up negative voices not because someone actually said them to us but because a situation or person made us feel a certain way—accidentally or purposefully. It’s worthwhile to find those places and write a different story.
2. Talk to someone
Having someone to talk to who can challenge you on those negative voices can be supremely helpful. It could be a partner, a trusted friend, a group of friends, a therapist. Everybody struggles with negative voices and imposter syndrome—and chances are, if you share about your struggles, someone else will have been there and can listen with an empathetic ear or walk you through it, if that’s what you need. Don’t underestimate the value of relationships to get you back on track.
3. Take some time off
We overlook this piece often—because we don’t want negative voices to win. And it feels like taking time off is letting them win.
But it’s not. I’ve found in my own life that my negative voices get loudest when I’m tired and I’ve been working maybe a little too hard and I haven’t had enough connection or restoration time. When I’m most in need of a break. It makes sense, doesn’t it? We can’t fight the “internal bad guys” when we’re tired or distracted or trying to hold a plate that’s way too full.
Set some things down. Put your feet up. Read a book. Watch a show or documentary. Call your sister. Take a walk and get out in nature. Listen to music. Dance. You’re not running away from the voices, you’re dismissing them—and having fun while you’re at it.
