Hibernation
unfinished letter #18
It might be the flu talking, but 2025 looks like the year of exhaustion… All those ideas. All that energy. The thrum of creativity that I had ridden for months - poof! Vanished into a cloud of blankets and used tissues. Sorry, yuck. I know.
We came home refreshed after spending the winter holidays with my in-laws. I had a writing schedule planned. Not to mention a home-based to-do list. And then the first big snowfall fell and my normal grit-your-teeth and suck-it-up spirit failed to show up.
D shoveled for hours. He’s 14 and suddenly 4 inches taller than I am. I meal-planned and grocery shopped and cooked, but my heart wasn’t in it.
The whole time, I fought the urge to curl up in bed with a book.
For years, I had seen Instagram health gurus wax poetic about seasonal shifts, about rest and digestion, about slowing down. Yeah yeah, I would think, and down another coffee.
Rest felt like a luxury afforded to the wealthy moms who dropped their little darlings off at school before they went to the studio for hatha yoga, not for the woman who shoved a granola bar into her mouth and washed it down with a bag of skittles on the way to the city soccer program before groceries and after homework help.