3 signs I'm in a personal winter
...and four ways I've learned to embrace, not waste, my glitchiest season
First, because priorities: Ceasefire NOW.🍉
I have this theory: We have our own seasons.
I don’t just mean that we’re affected by the natural seasons, though we obviously are.
I mean that each of us is experiencing our own, private, internal seasonal shifts: periods of time marked by differences in energy, motivation, creativity, connectivity, and productivity that arrive and pass in predictable cycles.
These seasons don’t arrive just once a year, or for a tidy three months at a time, for me. I have several Personal Winters per year—and sometimes multiple Winters in a month.
Does your Personal Winter look anything like mine?
1 | more input, less output.
It’s too risky for plants to spend their precious energy on pushing up new buds or sprouting new leaves during winter; ignoring the short days, cold temps, and minimal light could kill them. They’ll soak in whatever resources they can —scraps of sunlight, nourishing rain, bits of warmth left in the soil— knowing they won’t be able to do anything with those resources except store them for a future season’s growth. For now, they don’t need to create; they just need to live.
In a Personal Winter, I don’t have the bonus resources necessary for expressive stuff like creativity or productivity. Everything I’ve got —physical energy, mental focus, motivating emotions— are being spent on keeping me going, functioning, afloat. Like a plant going dormant in natural winter, my body/brain has entered energy conservation mode.
As my body clock shifts from [create! grow!] toward [conserve! get through this!] my interests shift, too. I can’t seem to finish any of the projects I start, but I can soak in a lot of new ideas.
In a Personal Winter, my curiosity is switched on and my creativity is switched off.
It’s not that I stop caring about being creative; I very badly want the yummy feelings that come with self-expression and productivity. When I say “switched off,” I mean: I don’t have the capacity to be creative, no matter how badly I want to be.
On full-capacity days, I find myself interested in behind-the-scenes learning: signing up for courses, bookmarking articles, burning through books… (Until I get mentally exhausted, of course, which doesn’t take long and then all I wanna do is lay down.)
On low-capacity days, I’m still soaking things in, but in a glitchier way: losing track of time scrolling TikTok from bed, bingeing an old tv season while also scrolling from the couch, watching every video a YouTuber has posted—even their forgotten content, four years deep.
2 | hermit-mode activated.
I also notice a low social battery: Instead of craving change or new experiences, I’m craving familiarity and comforting company.
Public-facing events start to feel draining; I only have the energy to hang out with my closest friends for brief periods at a time.
My social anxieties change, too: Instead of worrying about how I come across, I’m worried about who I’m letting down.
This pulling-back and getting-quiet thing happens so automatically that I don’t even notice the shift. It’s only when a long-distance friend sends a text asking me directly, “hey, you good? It’s been awhile, miss you” that I realize something about me has changed, all over again.
In a Personal Winter, being with other people takes a little more from my body’s energy budget, simply because I have less energy, overall—and time spent alone feels more restorative than usual.
It’s not that I become anti-social—and I’m not necessarily spending less time with friends, either. But it does take me longer to recover from being social, longer to reply to messages, and longer to come back to my inner baseline.
3 | my motivation, focus, and energy downshift.
Have you ever accidentally “used too much data” on your phone plan, so the all-powerful corporation puts a speed-cap on your internet use to punish you? You have no clue how they do it and definitely weren’t notified; all you know is that browsers are loading at a snail’s pace, your favorite shows won’t stop buffering, apps are crashing, and you’re very, very irritated about it all.
That’s me, before I realize I’ve shifted seasons.
In a Personal Winter, the things I want are no longer a match for my capacity—but I’m too frustrated about it, at first, to pause and accept the reasons why.
It’s not like I’m “suddenly tired”; my body is often tired, even in my most active personal seasons.
This dip feels more like…someone turned the volume down on my ambition, but never told me about it.
This can be confusing: A project I was genuinely hyped about a few days ago now feels over-complicated and dry. Everyday tasks —tasks that came so easily to me last season, I didn’t have to think about them— have now become draining and dread-worthy. Where is my motivation to start this project? Why are groceries so hard right now? What’s wrong with me?
It’s not that I feel less ambitious; it’s that I feel less able to meet my ambitions.
who turned on the way-back machine?
Before I understood that I even had a Personal Winter, I’d get stuck in this loop:
My energy would downshift, and I’d get frustrated.
Confused, I’d look back at my past self, trying to figure out what “mistakes” I must have made to end up feeling so slow, glitchy, and stuck.
Did I push myself too hard? Am I burnt out? Am I in the wrong line of work? Am I depressed? Am I taking bad care of myself? Have I lost my passion? Did I ever even have it? What’s going on??These simple questions would mutate into self-judgement, and suddenly I’d feel worse than before.
Drained by these uncomfy emotions, my energy downshifts further.
Cue more frustration. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Now that I understand my own seasons, I’ve figured out how to disrupt that loop.
Did I push myself to hard? Am I burnt out? Am I in the wrong line of work? Am I depressed? WAIT. This is familiar. I’m panicking. Why? …Because I can’t move as fast as I want to. AGAIN. It’s like I’m slowing down. Like I’m glitchi— oh shit, did I change personal seasons again?!
Even though I know to expect it, the energy-downshift of a Personal Winter still surprises and frustrates me, every time. And because I’m suprised, I still automatically ask the same questions. The only difference? Now I recognize these thoughts as signposts, signaling that my season has changed.
It makes sense to me now: The impulse to look back at my past self and past choices is a totally natural part of Personal Winter, a season filled with introspection and reflection.
It’s the self-loathing and self-judgement bit, however, that turns out to be totally unnecessary. It’s what happens when I’m looking at my past through the lens of grind culture, instead of through the lens of compassion.
you may be reading this like
“Alexis, this isn’t a ‘season’ for me. It’s like this all the time. My ambition never matches my capacity. I’m always more tired than I can explain. I’m perpetually frustrated to be glitching, sleepy, stuck, and uncreative. This is not temporary for me.”
You’re in good company, love.
As someone with a neurodivergent brain and a chronically ill / hyper-sensitive body (terms to describe myself that I only discovered in the past 4 years), Personal Winter has been a familiar, ongoing feature of my creative life. And because I prefer the long, sunny days of summer —literally and figuratively— it has taken me a very long time to accept the winter of it all.
In case it’s helpful, here are four realizations that have made this summer baby more accepting of her endless winter:
four ways I’ve learned to embrace, not waste, a personal winter
1 | don’t panic about the slow down.
Yes, you’ll freak out at first, because the energy downshift is confusing and your feelings are valid. But then you can gently remind yourself that this is exactly how things are supposed to work.
Yes, you’re just as ambitious as you were before—and no, now is not the time to make all of those things happen.
Like a brain processing new memories during sleep or a plant going dormant in winter, you need downtime to metabolize the growing that you’ve been doing all year.
2 | shift your focus from growth to reflection.
Hindsight is 20-20, and you’re about to get hyper-aware of your past self and the choices that led to this moment in time. Rather than judge yourself for how you’re feeling or overthink how you got here, respect the many things you’ve realized.
Reflect on purpose: Don’t lose the lessons from your Personal Spring, Summer or Fall; write them down in a journal, or record them in a rambling audio note.
Skip the self-loathing; document what you’re realizing.
3 | let yourself hermit, not ghost.
This is something I’m still actively working on: When you notice you need more time alone to recover from being social, let your friends know what’s up.
Suggest alternate, lower-pressure ways to hang out. “I don’t have the energy tokens for a big group thing, but I’d love to come with you when you run errands, would that be cool?”
Leave content notes in your text messages. “Rambling voice note incoming! But no rush to reply, love you.”
Be honest about the support you need. “I’m having a hard day, but I don’t have the energy to talk through it. Could you maybe send me a meme that made you laugh?”
Everybody goes through phases where they need more space! The people who love you won’t judge you for that, but they will want to be looped in.
4 | go creatively dormant.
Conserve your resources! Release the expectation that you need to be making, doing, proving, creative, productive, or expressive.
Let yourself shift from output to input, being intentional about what you soak in. Think of yourself like a sponge, absorbing ideas, inspiration, and relief.
Eventually, you’ll feel bored and saturated, and that fullness will transform into the discontented urge to express yourself all over again.
Seasons are like that, you know? Cyclical.
___
In case you’re wondering, I’m currently in the beginnings of a Personal Spring, not Personal Winter. It’s the only reason I have the capacity to write this newsletter/essay/thing to you now! These ideas arrived more than four months ago and (unsurprisingly) my capacity to express them then was nowhere to be found. Because, you know, Personal Winter.
Whatever season of growth you’re in, I’m sending you love.
—Alexis
ALSO: What are your Personal Winters like? Honestly, I’d love to know. If you have the social battery, hit reply or share some details of your own Winter in the comments…I feel like the more we can collectively normalize the peaks, valleys, and constant change that comes with being a human, the better.
looking for the audio edition of this newsletter? here you go!
PS: Don’t see a button below? Only paid subscribers have access to audio and video content right now. You can upgrade here. But if you’d like to make an access request for the audio, send me a message and I’ll email it to you for free, asap! ❤️
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