the good you need will find you

“despite the forecast, live like it’s spring.” – lilly pulitzer

“April is a reminder that something better is always around the corner.”—Unknown

If you’re feeling hopeful about the future, but frustrated that the reality you dreamed up hasn’t fully been realized yet, you’re not having a mental breakdown, you’re just in April.

Photo by Gage Walker on Unsplash

T.S. Eliot called it “the cruelest month,” and it’s probably because April holds both glistening promise and surly disappointment. It’s the end of a season, without the next having fully arrived. It isn’t winter, but it also doesn’t feel like spring just yet. It’s a transition, a hallway of sorts, between darkness and light, rain and sunlight. It’s overflowing with promise and possibility, but void of anything tangible. April is just spring begging to be believed.

If you’re in the midst of some ill-timed blues, you’re certainly not alone, in fact depression tends to spike during the springtime.

Contrary to what we would expect, suicide rates are highest now, not while we’re all trying to persevere through winter. While it would be rational to predict that we get more depressed during harsh cold months, it’s actually the other way around. And while there’s a few competing theories about why that is, the most compelling one is that hibernation was acceptable, and suddenly as we enter warmer weather, is no longer so. We feel the collective pressure to re-enter the social scene as a butterfly, when we may still feel like we need more time in our cocoon. Spring might be ready for you, but you might not be ready for her just yet.

Contrary to what we would expect, suicide rates are highest now, not while we’re all trying to get through winter. While it would be rational to predict that we get more depressed during harsh cold months, it’s actually the other way around.

If you’re impatient, transitions while necessary, can feel painfully aggravating. You know how you want to feel, but you’re not quite there. How infuriating. It’s the perfect recipe for any determined person to go mad. It’s a specific feeling that doesn’t have a name (if you do come up with a term please leave drop it in the comments) that can only be described as a mix of excitement for what’s to come and melancholy for what you’ll need to abandon in order to get it. It’s hard to let something go without knowing what you’ll get instead.

But in order for spring to begin, winter has to end. Your new life is going to cost you your old one. So while you wait for your new beginning, rather than stressing about when it will arrive, and what it will look like, and who will be there, why not decorate the hallway? You don’t know how good it’s going to get yet, so you might as well enjoy the snacks in the in-between room while you wait.

After all, as Hal Borland once wrote, "No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn. April is a promise that May is bound to keep, and we know it."

Let April, be April. Let your life, be your life. It’s going to be okay, but it’s going to be different. And isn’t that what you’ve been asking for anyways?

"No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn. April is a promise that May is bound to keep, and we know it." – Hal Borland

Before I go, I want to remind you to mark your calendar for our next live event, a special sharing circle that will feature Soraya Chemaly on the topic of resilience! You’ll get to spend an hour on zoom with me and share your wins, your fails, your dreams and everything in between. Make sure to become a paid subscriber now so that you get access to the link the day before. Your subscription helps pay the rent for zoom every month.

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x

Liz