New year feelings
Do you ever experience a bit of relief as the New Year starts and next Christmas is a whole year away? Christmas can be a difficult time for many, but it rarely feels OK to say so. This year I found myself experiencing a feeling of pointlessness that was not at all jolly, but as I stayed with it, I learnt something important. I have got used to a dark mood descending as December approaches. It comes with a mix of challenging feelings and there are very few people I can admit this to who can hear me without needing to jolly me up. When I do speak about what I am feeling, I get the impression that I am not alone, and that many others also find this festival tricky.
A feeling I couldn’t shake
This year, the challenging feeling was one of pointlessness. If you have ever felt a heavy, grey, unproductive miasma settle on you in winter, you may know this feeling too. For me, it comes with brain fog, a very heavy head, a gloomy, black mood, sometimes nausea, and a sense that I need to drag myself around to get anything done. I recognise that this feeling was specifically attached to Christmas. Also, that it has its origins in childhood experiences in which Christmas seemed to promise something it failed to deliver. But it also generalised, enveloping me in the thought that everything I do is pointless and, eventually, that I am pointless. Quite a lot of negativity to take into the festive season.
What busyness hides
You might recognise that sometimes you get busy with one thing to avoid facing something else that feels difficult. I can see that the frantic activity I often experience around Christmas getting the presents, organising visits, doing the cooking, and so on—was much more manageable than the feeling that I was pointless, and served to keep me from feeling it. This year, however, I wasn’t hosting Christmas and had very little responsibility. That made it easier to recognise the frantic feelings as a cover-up and to allow the feeling of pointlessness to emerge.
Staying with the feeling
I lived with this feeling for nearly two weeks, until the winter solstice passed and the light began to return. What dawned on me then was that this very difficult feeling might be useful, if I didn’t need to run away from it. Much of my earlier life—as a career woman with small children, and later as a single parent of adolescents—had been frantic. Like so many others in this situation, I needed to multitask at speed, with great efficiency and competence to keep the ship afloat, and I was good at it. With the benefit of hindsight, I can now see that some of the projects and programmes I initiated or became involved with, which added to my already full list of things to be accomplished, were very unlikely to succeed in that time and place.
I began to see that the feeling of pointlessness might not be telling me that nothing I did mattered or that I didn’t matter, it was telling me that some of the things I was doing didn’t. Had I allowed myself to experience this feeling of pointlessness, I might have saved myself a great deal of time and effort and made my life more spacious. I might also have spared others the experience of working or living with someone who was frantic.
What emerged in its place
When this insight arrived, the gloom and heaviness began to dissipate and the feeling shifted. I was very drawn to the idea that the feeling of pointlessness was about discernment rather than despair and excited about being able to exercise more discernment in how I use my time and energy. At times I felt spaced out and light-headed, but without the brain fog or gloom. I was also able to sense just how exhausted and depleted I was, and to respond by doing very little—certainly nothing productive or valuable to others. Have you tried this kind of ‘non-doing’? Even though I know the theory, the actuality still feels unfamiliar and disconcerting. This time, though, I managed to stick with it and enjoy the fact that winter is meant to be a time of rest and restoration. Gradually, doing nothing became attractive. Living on my own and not organising anything, the experience was somewhat solitary. I would have enjoyed more company, but I wasn’t yet convinced that others would enjoy exploring difficult feelings in this way and I was concerned that they might interfere with me doing so. But this hypothesis needs testing.
An invitation
So I am wondering about organising a workshop next year for those who want to explore what they are feeling as Christmas approaches, to embrace those feelings and allow them to evolve and transform in whatever way they need to. And to enjoy a day of inactivity, rest, and recuperation in good company in my delightful Oxford Annex. Do get in touch if that appeals.
