The Coming of Yule

In seven days it’s supposed to be the shortest day of the year, except it is today, due to a weird tilt of the Earth and each day after will get progressively brighter. This is meant to feel optimistic and enthusiastic but it means there is a week when it will be the darkest and the transition towards Yule will set us on a path of regeneration, renewal and self-reflection.

In considering these, the path forward for me is so dark and shrouded, despite a year of intensive therapy pointing out ways to regenerate through boundary setting, identification of emotional states, renewing oneself through self-care, and maintaining reflective and practices in gratitude and self-awareness. It has been a year of steep learning curves and tough choices.

And, yet, it still feels like a wilderness. Brené Brown describes the wilderness as “an unarmed, unpredictable place of solitude and searching. It is a place as dangerous as it is breathtaking, a place as sought after as it is feared. But it turns out to be the place of true belonging, and it’s the bravest and most sacred place you will ever stand.” 

Being lost in this place doesn’t feel anywhere close to sacred, I’m not grateful for the isolation of my thoughts or my inabilities to make clear any of the paths before me. Instead I feel waves of grief at having closed doors and burned bridges; I feel rage at injustices that will never be set right, and hurts that have no foreseeable balms. It would be easier to go back, to fall into those traps of old habits and toxic environments because what is known—even those things that will hurt me—remain familiar. I can cope there because I have always done so and can continue to.

But what is coping, trying? Is it denial, wrapped up in habit? Therapy tells me that to cope is simply to bear up under circumstances beyond your ken by simply displacing the processing of that moment. That is, it is avoidance of pain. It is, in its own way, an abandonment of self to the wild. And the willingness to allow that abandonment to consume me.

And so, a crossroad. My body rebels against this inertia and urges me to regenerate, to renew, to reflect. I know this because movement shifts me, physically, and even those waves of grief do not keep me in place but leaves me, tempest tossed and bound to land somewhere new, as we creep towards the light.