The Color of Winter II: Fade Out

Holidays are hard for me, typically. At my worst, the few years before this last one, I slid into hopelessness at the beginning of October and didn't crawl out again until April. This last year, I struggled some, to make social plans, but much of the rest of my life was unscathed. The hardest period was nothing compared to that black six months of years past, and it only lasted a couple of weeks around Christmas. But the holidays still wore at me. The weather wore at me. I was terrified to cycle in the snow and cold. And the prospect of moving, repeatedly yanked away from me, that wore at me most of all.

I managed a few great things over the winter. I applied for a job. The first time in six years of disability. I added two more dance nights, so that I was taking west African dance classes four times a week. I added another night of volunteering at the bike workshop, and I began to join the other volunteers in community activist projects. And I beat that snow and ice terror and got to cycling through the worst of the weather, feeling deeply empowered for having done so.

But with everything that wore at me, my social tendency suffered, confidence waned, direction became muddled. Trust in the universe and the sense that my path was open, beautiful and attainable, and the compassion that came with that sense, began to fade. I was still doing all the big things I'd cultivated over the last year, but all the small things I'd been doing to make it all flow smoothly were left unattended, and began to wither. And the scold of the raven, the roar of the bear--days passed, then weeks, where they would to fail to reach me at all. I wasn't in a nosedive, but my climb upward had become a precarious hang in space without my feet rooted in reality.