Fighting Winter

It’s 1st January 2022 and I feel a way…

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it has an uncomfortable air of melancholy. As much as I am no longer as driven or deterred by comparison to others, I cannot help but judge my present self and find myself lacking compared with myself of this time last year, or indeed at any other time. Whilst it seems most around me are celebrating even the smallest of wins ‘we got through it!’ I, like many others don’t feel like all of me did make it through. My usual goal is just to be better than I was before- to keep growing and learning, and although 2021 revealed so many essential lessons for the road ahead; in many ways it left me feeling smaller than ever. Deep down I know that there has been growth, but from here, without the aid of perspective, it feels like I am shrunken, withered.

I feel less than.

True, much of what was left behind was baggage that I will not need, maybe even all of it. But because the weight has become so familiar to me over the years, I still have that nagging feeling of having left something important behind. And yet there is the unmistakeable glimpse of a fiercely burning hope, barely discernible through clouds of uncertainty and tempered with a chill breeze of unprocessed grief which gusts through without warning, reminding me that despite those rare and beautiful slices of low, golden sunlight, it is indeed still winter.

I try to welcome the melancholy, as I am trying to welcome and rest into this winter- my winter, and allow myself to simply be. But having a mind that is pathologically overactive (yet somehow also inert through burnout), in combination with a body which is pathologically exhausted (yet somehow constantly restless) is a febrile combination of paradoxes and I cannot help but rail against the cold.

So instead of contentedly snuggling into hibernation to wait out the sparse months, despite being so fortunate as to have the space and time to do so, I find myself still resisting. Still desperate to leap forward to the spring. Not the calendar spring of daffodils, fluffy chicks and chocolate eggs; but my own personal spring of beginning afresh with the energy and vigour that medication promises, the knowledge that my months long focus on understanding my neurodivergence has given me, and the clarity that therapy and coaching are helping me towards.

Intellectually I know. I know that this can’t be rushed. That I must winter it out; wait for my brain to recover so that I am indeed starting afresh, rather than starting at just a different deficit. If I should launch myself headlong into all the hopes and dreams and ideas that are, and have been bubbling away, suppressed inside me for who knows how long, without allowing myself the time to heal, however restorative these things feel; there is a very real danger that I will find myself back in the same leaky boat as soon as I return to work.

My job as a clinical scientist is (to me at least) inherently stressful and frequently exhausting. It requires a level of attention to detail that it is not yet clear if my brain will be able to provide even once medicated. The fact that it has in the past, provides some hope, but after the damage I have done by ignoring the signs of impending burnout and pushing on regardless for most of last year, I cannot say without a doubt.

I’ve used the term burnout in the past to describe the brain-fogging level of tiredness that comes after a particularly heavy month of on-call, perhaps combined with a poorly child or some other ill-timed life-admin that lack of sleep deems almost (though never quite) impossible to contend with. The feeling of apathy, tetchiness and not being able to muster enthusiasm for anything, and maybe that was a burnout of sorts. But this; this is a whole new ball game.

I’m officially signed off sick with ‘stress and anxiety’, but I don’t feel like it’s an accurate diagnosis at all. I don’t even know if ‘burnout’ is a medical diagnosis, but that’s what feels like an accurate description of what I have been experiencing. The out-dated, (and I have often thought offensive) term ‘nervous breakdown’ even feels like a better fit than ‘stress and/ or anxiety’. Although I am feeling more like myself more recently; the month of October, lots of November and a fair bit of December were spent feeling like my neural circuitry had been well and truly fried.

I am not fool enough to believe that I won’t ever find myself burned out again by taking this care now. I don’t think that if I settle down and winter thoroughly and responsibly now, I shall be spared from future cold snaps. I know that’s not how life works; I know the cyclical nature of it. I also know that burnout is a common occurrence amongst the neurodiverse trying to live in a world set up by and for for the neurotypical.

Our world situation doesn’t look like it’s going to stop challenging any of us, whatever our neurotype, any time soon, and the fact that my brain seems incapable of rest, despite that being exactly what it needs is yet another daily internal battle that I cannot win.

Contrary to how it might sound so far, I don’t hate winter. I love a crisp, bright winter’s morning, frost glittering magically on the plants and fence posts. Mists hanging over the damp earth; a veil of mystery on those days where the sun barely shows it’s face before midday, if at all. The preponderance of tiny, noisy, garden birds; sparrows, tits, nuthatch and everyone’s winter favourite the robin! The larger thrush, blackbirds, jays, and even a family of woodpeckers in our woods.

I don’t hate winter; season of my birthday and those of many of the people I love the most. Christmas and New Year- I can take or leave to be fair, though I relish the chance to spend time with my loved ones without the same pressures as the rest of the year. The spectacular sunsets, dramatic cloud formations which dissolve and reform charging across the sky at a rate of knots or hanging, heavy and ominous in the sky with threats of rain, sleet, snow, hail depending on the exact hue and weight, if you have the time look closely enough you can just about tell. The chance to see sunrise without having to rise at some ungodly hour is always a joy!

I’m just not a natural fit with the cold, just as despite my melanin I am not a natural fit with extreme heat! The slow, slow pace of life as it is now; this wintery existence that I find myself in, whilst not intolerable, is not comfortable to me. Just as the frenetic pace of pre-burnout life that left me scorched to my very soul was not comfortable either. I’ve always found it hard to regulate my body temperature; to be comfortable at either extreme, but especially the cold. In the overzealous air conditioning of our open plan office, I am oft bemoaning the arctic chill whilst donning extra layers of woollen blazer AND the poncho (/blanket!) that has a permanent home on the back of my chair.

Fortunately, I no longer spend as much time in the labs, where the air-con frequently cannot cope with the feeble attack of the UK summer in addition to the heat pumped out by the equipment. The short periods I spend providing supervision or training in the summer months leave me gasping for respite and refreshment before long. Just like Goldilocks, I need it to be ‘just right’! I thought this was just a ‘me’ thing, but it turns out that along with my constantly cold hands and feet, and almost everything else I know about myself, it’s an ADHD thing.

Maybe it’s time I stop resisting the resistance. Maybe I need to allow myself to feel cheated, stifled, frozen out and hemmed in by my situation, even if I know it is for the best. Perhaps when I allow myself the resistance it will pass through me and allow me to settle into winter. And then, as according to The Law of Sod, the warm, damp birth of Spring will be upon me just as I get comfortable in the cold!

I need to find a temperate pace of life; a balance that nourishes my creative soul with rest and space to breathe and think whole thoughts. But that also acknowledges that my brain needs dopamine, and if it isn’t coming from workplace stress then I’d better make damn sure it’s coming from a healthy source elsewhere, otherwise it’ll create drama where it needn’t be, and the comedown will not be worth the hit!

As usual I’m publishing this post weeks after writing it on New Years Day. Later that day I was delighted to see that one of Insta-faves Laura had made her monthly appearance and closed her post with the following line which I loved:

“‘I hope there was light and love in your deepest winter too, friends’”

— Laura Aziz 01/01/2022.

I feel very lucky to say now, as I emerge into spring, that there was indeed light and love in my deepest winter.

I hope that there was (or will be) in yours too.