little goals, small steps
a gentle life pivot on the solstice
The solstice is a marker of time, a turning point. It’s a reminder to tilt and pivot as the earth does, too. It feels particularly poignant for me this year and I’m not entirely sure why. I suppose I feel quite vulnerable which is expected in mid-winter but I also think it’s normal to feel this way the week before your book is out in the world. I’m bracing myself and simultaneously ready to pass it on to the readers; it’s their’s now.
This week I went back to my notebook that I started even before I had a contract (I always start books by handwriting in notebooks) and it’s so comforting to see the beginning, the embryonic thoughts — lists of relevant words, questions, observations, touchstone sentences that contained the tone I wanted to carry throughout the manuscript. I’ve come so far in two years and this little green notebook that’s now dogeared and on some pages, barely legible, is tangible evidence.
Reflection is so vital for our sense of self; for how far we’ve come, how we’re growing and evolving. But it’s not happenstance in normal life. We’re so focused on what’s to come, that we rarely slow down long enough to sit and ponder the steps we took to get to where we are now. We also live in a world that is obsessed with navigating the hard stuff efficiently and then carrying on as we did beforehand; not changed or altered by what we’ve experienced.
I keep returning to the social expectation that new mothers need to ‘bounce back’ after birth regardless of the fact that it’s biologically impossible. My friend
, who is an autistic woman and the first person I turn to when I’m seeking a better understanding of what it means to be neurodiverse in a neurotypical world, says the same about society’s obsession with resilience. Both words roughly mean ‘to recover from a setback quickly’ and yet what we know about being human is that there is never any ‘going back’ — we are always moving forward carrying what we’ve learnt and experienced along the way. Life changes us and yet we’re encouraged to pretend that it doesn’t.Who makes the rules around here? Not a woman stewing apples on the solstice, that’s for sure.