Not now, I'm wintering
saying no to new year's resolutions
Audio Transcript
Hello friends, welcome to Girl With Antlers. This post is going to be a little bit of an experiment. It’s something that I’ve been wanting to try for a few weeks now, doing a little audio-entry like this. I’ve had this list of topics sitting in my notes app for months that I’d love to write on—personal reflections, observations, non-fiction pieces—but every time I go to actually write an essay on them, I hit a bit of a mental block. Part of this is my own insecurity and self-consciousness about writing non-fiction (I feel much more comfortable in the realm of stories and magic). I find myself getting caught up in word choice and the craft of it, my perfectionism rearing its ugly head.
But I love talking about the creative process and there are conversations that I’d really love to have about it. I’m a verbal processor, and instead of trying to force what wasn’t feeling right, I thought maybe I’d give this a try instead. I’m not thinking of this as formally as a podcast—more as audio-diary entries, for lack of a better word. They’ll be a little raw, a little rough around the edges. Maybe one day it’ll evolve into something more formal, but for now, it’s going to be very free-form and flowing, and I’ll just take it one post at a time and see how they go.
I hope you enjoy this format and let’s get into it.
Lately I’ve been thinking about wintering and the concept of a creative winter. I know
has a whole book on wintering (I haven’t read it yet, I need to, it’s on my list) where she talks about wintering as a season of rest and recovery following hardship or a difficult time; I’m using the term a little bit more loosely here, still as a season of rest and recovery, but one that occurs on an annual basis or as a natural part of our creative flow.I’m from the Pacific Northwest, and we have very defined seasons here—spring is wet and tempestuous, summer is hot and languid and glorious, autumn is cool and crisp with colorful leaves. Then we have winter, and winter is cold and grey and it’s very, very dark. The sun sets around 4:30pm in January and the skies are mostly overcast. Everything has this desaturated shroud.
What I’ve been noticing is how my own cycles of creative energy seem to mirror the seasons of the earth around me. If you’ve been around my blog for a bit or seen my art, you know that I’m one of the witchy folk, so solstices and the seasonal turn are very important to me.
This year, I noticed that right around the winter solstice, I just hit a wall. All the energy that I’d been harvesting throughout the fall—projects I wanted to do, plans that I had for this Substack, for my photography, for all my creative outlets—it was like all that just drained down through the soles of my feet the moment the season shifted. Honestly, I felt kind of lost at first. I was confused where all that momentum had gone. What is seasonal affective disorder, is it holiday burnout? It wasn’t that I didn’t have the time, I just didn’t have the motivation. I didn’t want to do anything.
This shift for me was happening right at the same time that the cultural narrative was encouraging me to make plans. We see it every year, this glorification of goal-setting right after the holidays, the blank slate, starting the new year off on the “right foot.” Anyone who knows me personally knows that I’m a very goals-oriented person. To do lists, project trackers—this is my thing, and you’d expect that new year’s resolutions would be something that I really resonate with. Even in my art and my writing projects, I’m constantly setting my sights on some distant horizon to motivate myself. Despite that, I felt out of sync with that new year's energy that everyone else seemed to be participating in. Everything in me was saying slow down, take a break, rest, and it happened so suddenly, going from the energy and momentum that I had in fall to this dormancy.
I had a similar experience last year after Christmas and around the new year, but I was pregnant at the time and thought that my lack of energy was mostly due to the newness I was facing. Watching myself go through the same energetic shift again this year though made me start to question: what if January isn’t the right time for resolutions?
So often people set goals this time of year and then feel guilty when they’re not able to follow through on them (I know I’ve experienced this myself before). The New Year’s resolution becomes a stick we beat ourselves with, just another way for our imposter syndrome to prove to us that we’re not good enough and that we can’t cut it. But maybe part of that struggle with following through on our goals at this time of year is just that the depth of winter isn’t the best time for new growth.
It makes sense if we think of creative cycles as mirroring the natural turn of the seasons. Like the earth around us, a creative winter would be a time for turning inward and conserving our strength, our resources. It’s a time for returning to our home, our den, our nest, for listening to the soft animal of our bodies and just allowing ourselves to burrow.
The etymology of the word solstice is ‘sun stands still.’ But I don’t think this means that we have to be stagnant during winter or while we’re experiencing a creative winter. The earth doesn’t stop when the leaves fall and the animals hibernate. There is still growth happening, but it’s under the surface, in the dark and the deep. It’s internal. This is a quiet season, full of roots establishing and ideas germinating within, not these loud declarations for all the world to see.
The garden of my life is rooted in the darkness of my soil.
The image that resonates with me the strongest for this season is that of a seed. It makes me think of the myth of Persephone and her pomegranates. If wintering is a kind of metaphorical underworld, it makes sense that we would feel an urge to retreat within ourselves this season, to tend what’s within in preparation for a burst of life and energy that will return in the spring.
Personally, thinking of my creativity this way feels like a permission slip, one that allows me to let go of any artificial pressure or hustle or external goals on my art. I think of those seeds of creativity, planted in the soil, slowly geminating. I’m tending to them, I’m nurturing them, but I’m not expecting them to flower just yet. I’m adjusting my expectations of my output and allowing things to sprout and grow in their own time rather than trying to force them.
I share this experience because I’ve found that when I don’t honor my own creative cycles it can quickly lead to burnout and creative stress and anxiety. I also find this concept of a creative winter reassuring because it reminds me, even if I’m feeling a lull right now, that my energy and momentum will come back. I haven’t lost it, and the lack of motivation I feel may not mean that anything is wrong in my life. It could just be my heart and body recognizing the signals of the world around me, and that I’m needing a bit of time to move slower and returning to a more intuitive state.
If you’re someone who enjoys new year’s resolutions and they work for you, that’s wonderful and I hope you continue to make them—but if you’re like me and the idea of setting new goals in January makes you feel off, I encourage you to honor that feeling and to reflect on some of these images and symbolism that I talk about here. There will be time for setting new goals later on. It’s ok to wait, to not line up with the calendar year, to treat winter as a season of reflection. We can use this time to explore and play, to figure out what we want those goals to be in future, selecting through those seeds and deciding what we want to grow in the spring. It’s ok to honor your seasons, whatever they may be.
I am curious, because obviously my concept of wintering is very influenced by the landscape and environment that I grew up in: for those of you living in a warmer climate without such drastic seasons, do you experience a dip like this in your creative energy at all? Or do you find things to be more mild and consistent throughout the year? Let me know in the comments, I’d love to hear if other people feel impacted by their environment in a similar way.
If you enjoyed this post and format, please leave me a comment or reply to this email, and feel free to share this article with someone you think it will resonate with. I’m still feeling a bit self-conscious about sharing my voice in this way, so would love to know if you’d like to have more conversations like these in future.
I’m Kerani Arpaia, a fantasy photographer and writer from Portland, Oregon. You can find more of my art, fiction writing, and personal stories on my Substack, Girl With Antlers, which you can find at keraniarpaia.substack.com.
Thank you so much for listening and I’ll see you next time.
You are transforming. This time of year is for regeneration not resolution. New years resolutions are antithetical to the energy of the spiritual cosmos. Time, when linear is more subject to the whims of the outer reality, whilst the inner reality is more in tune with the rythms of the higher self.
It’s so funny because I have seen the seasonal cycles as something else I am doing “wrong.” I think it’s so lovely and romantic to have energy that mirrors the landscape.
My own energy is inverted. I have absolutely no energy in summer - the heat and oppressive humidity completely drain and overstimulate me. I have the most energy in autumn (an awkward time when people are beginning to be overwhelmed by the holidays) so I work away and hold onto things until January and Feb when I can send them out into the world. I wind down toward the end of Spring and then hibernate and reset over Summer.
I only realized and accepted this about myself last year. It can be such a game changer to work within our natural energy cycles rather than fighting them or expecting full productivity year round. Thanks for writing this. 🌾