I’ve been spiraling a bit lately if I’m honest. 

I am deep inside the process of reworking the ways I’ve always worked. Once upon a time, even this time last year, I was an exemplary Gen Xer who navigated the world without feelings. I mean, I felt. Of course I did. But I felt in ways that were scrunched and hunched. Gathered in on myself. With the effort mainly to suppress rather than express the harder emotions. Except that only works for as long as it works, which is, in my estimation, approximately 51 years before a human who experiences major depressive disorder and often crippling anxiety decides to do psilocybin therapy, bash down every protective wall, enter weekly therapy, and emerge from the crysallis of depression weak and wet and vulnerable to try to build an embodied life. An authentic life. An unboxed life. And that right there is a pretty significant disruption of the emotional status quo. 

Halloween and All Saints Day and All Souls Day and the Day of the Dead feel right, all this death and life intermingled. The veil thin between what’s always been and what’s no more and what’s to come. The liminal space. The in between. The waiting stillness. The release of leaves from their anchoring branches, fluttering down to do the hard work of decay. Crumbling and breaking down seems so very dark and dismal and cold. Or so it has always seemed to me, this season. Final. An end. When, in fact, it’s the crumbling and breaking down that releases nutrients into hungry soil. It’s shelter and protection for the microorganisms to create the loamy womb for life. It’s the necessary ingredient for growth. 

I have hated that, always. That death is necessary for life. That loss and grief are ingredients. I have fled the darkness at every opportunity. Distracted myself from loneliness and despair and rejection and insignificance and terror. In my defense, I thought feeling any of the hard feelings–feeling them thoroughly, feeling them entirely, feeling them in a way that surrounded and engulfed me–might kill me actually dead. Not that I might kill me dead. I mean I thought the feelings themselves might kill me dead. Without my go ahead. Without my permission. Just that the feelings would eclipse me like a tidal wave and crush me to dust. I was so, so afraid to feel, friends. Just absolutely beyond. 

Choosing to try felt like the Greatest Risk. One of the biggest of my lifetime. But also, Not Feeling was, I have come to understand, a Pretty Major Fucking Factor in experiencing depression as I have for decades. I just truly believed on some level that I could grit my way through life. Blunt the effect of the more stabby forces. Become a teflon pan and let everything slide off. And if teflon isn’t the most accurate metaphor, then I don’t know what is with the way it promises to protect but quickly scratches and crumbles and flakes and infects food and causes an adhered mess more profoundly awful than a sear on stainless ever would. 

But here I am, feeling feelings on purpose for 8 months now, and they haven’t killed me yet. It’s shocking to me, genuinely, how quickly feelings can flow, in and out like the tide, and that I can flow with them now that I’m not trying to stand rigid in the surf pretending not to be buffeted by the waves.

Still, it’s November now, and I’ve noticed I’m afraid more lately. Afraid of what might yet come. Because this is the time of year every year prior that my mental health starts to tank. Vitamin D leaves for its southern vacation. The days get progressively shorter. But the truth is, depression hasn’t arrived for me yet, and I’m realizing I’m not so much actually anxious as I am anxious that I’ll become anxious. (Trying to exist in this world with a human brain is rough, OK?) In other words, I am experiencing dread because I am habitually trained to fear the fall and approaching winter.

I took a walk today on the trail behind my house. I walked slowly through the fallen leaves. I slipped on the moss and did a slow slide to the earth, bracing my hands in the mud and the grime and the dirt. I started to weep because suddenly, overwhelmingly, I understood I only have one job right now, and it’s this: to welcome this season. To greet the darkness. To allow the shorter days to slow my roll. To accept sinking to the earth. To crumble and break down. To feed the soil and become the loamy womb. To believe in the cycle of life and that this time of death is an integral part.