Fall: My Favorite Season But One I Dread The Most
Do you ever feel a certain type of way ‘just because’? Like something is wrong, or you’re extra tired, or just grumpy and mad at the world for ‘no reason?’
Pro tip here: Pay attention to the season.
No, not the season of your life bullshit, but the real season. Is it Fall, Winter, Spring, or Summer?
Our five senses have an innate ability to affect our inner being. It’s just like how the smell of apple pie takes you back to your mom’s or grandma’s kitchen. Or how a song brings back the emotion to a certain time in your life—good or bad. Or you know when you tell a story over and over again? Even though you know the person you’re telling it to has heard it before? It’s because one or more of your five senses brought that memory back to mind and you had to get it out into the world again before you blew a gasket.
You see, Fall is an interesting time for me. It is a time for new beginnings—school starts up; green leaves transform into a beautiful, fiery red color; the excitement of a new football season (Go Colts!); and it’s also the season that made me a mom for the first time, which is the most profound joy I’ve ever known.
But, it is also a time for uncertainty, death, and endings. My dad was responding well to cancer treatments—then he got sicker, weaker, and then died all within two months. Physically watching a human being transition from life to death is a surreal experience—one that I have yet to fully grieve. The moment. I hear it, I feel it with my hands, I see it, but most of all, I feel it in my body.
With the unprocessed grief, I imagine the same senses when Fall comes around. When I hear the trees whistling with the breeze, I imagine the wails I let out. When I feel the wonderful chill in the air, I feel my hands wrapped around my dad’s left hand. When I see the leaves change under a blue sky with those big, puffy, white clouds, I imagine his lasting gasping respiration.
Meanwhile, I physically feel the pain in my body. It’s a heaviness, a racing heart, a clenching jaw. It’s something that I go through when the first chill in the air arrives through the end of the season.
For the first 8-ish years after my dad died, I blamed these physical and mental feelings on everything else but grief—“Oh, it’s my hormones” or “Man, this hangover has lasted like a whole week!”—until I started noticing a pattern. It happened every Fall season. The same experience within my body, but different time and circumstances.
It wasn’t until I came in tune with myself. Living years in autopilot and dissociation dug a hole deeper and deeper into my core for my grief to live. With a “DEAD END—NO OUTLET” sign nailed to it. It had nowhere to go but up. Grief energy invaded my core. Hence, part of the reason why I had a heaviness in my belly, my diaphragm, and chest. Energy is energy and with no outlet, my body was the only place it could live and grow—until I learned to sit with the uncomfortable to become more comfortable.
I saw a quote the other day on Instagram that said “It’s not about feeling better. It’s about getting better at feeling.” It struck me: one, because I knew I was going to be writing this blog and it fits perfectly into the theme and two, it put into words how I run my business and talk with my clients. The number one health goal people have talked to me about is ‘feeling better.’ Now that may mean different things to different people. It may mean more energy, losing weight, feeling refreshed upon waking, being able to play with their kids without getting winded, the list goes on. But ‘feeling better’ cannot and will not happen if we don’t even know a feeling exists.
We live in a world where pain is abundant, yet we reach for external measures for relief. Medicine, alcohol, supplements, binge eating, and hell, even working with a functional nutritionist like myself or a counselor. Although our bodies are primed to heal from within and knows the answers, we have done an extremely great job at hitting the mute button when it comes to our bodies’ trying to tell us something. Wonder why we, as a society, are getting sicker (especially mentally) although we have all the technology and all the comfortability in the world?
It’s because of the dissociation of our minds from our bodies. Instead of tuning into ourselves, we tune into ‘biohacking,’ the magic supplements, the influencers telling us what we should be doing with our own bodies.
Doesn’t it sound weird that we have to ‘hack’ our biology? Like I hate that term and when I broke it down, I hated it even more. Hacking is a negative connotation—the definition is literally “to gain unauthorized access to data in a system.” Like WUT? Instead of industrializing or manufacturing your own body, maybe try SIMPLE, FREE changes.
Blue light-blocking glasses? Maybe try keeping your phone out of the bedroom if you’re worried about sleep.
Forgot to start your workout on your fitness tracker or Apple Watch? It’s okay. You moved—that was the goal right? Or was it to share it with a friend or social media to gain validation that you moved?
Anyways, I digress.
The moment I started tuning into the feeling in my gut, the clenching in my jaw, the cyclical symptoms I had every Fall (I’m a poet and didn’t even know it 😉), was the moment that I could start to heal. The moment I could navigate what was needed to move forward. The moment that I could get going with my own ‘feeling better’ goal.
Feeling off or feeling abnormal is a sign. It’s a sign that you’re either living abnormally and/or your body has unprocessed emotion from a past experience. If it’s the latter, the tether will not break until you feel it. Release the energy pent up inside.
Whether it’s sadness, pain, grief, anger, shame, or guilt, there are three action steps to make a seismic shift in your life when it comes to the body manifesting symptoms from past experiences:
1. Physically release pent up energy: Cry it out. Punch a pillow. Belt out your favorite song. Write out the past experience holding you back, then tear that piece of paper to shreds (or start a blog like yours truly). Declutter. Rage clean.
2. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable: These feelings are not fun. It’s going to feel like a total bomb went off and you will feel obliterated from that. Don’t let that deter you, though. The lightness and the freedom you will feel is unlike anything you’ve felt before.
3. Lean into your people: Talk it out. One area that I have had trouble with is speaking what I am feeling. Even to the people that I love the most. I’ve had to have my wife come to me, look me in the eye, and say, “What’s going on?” I would say “nothing” and she would literally keep asking until I would ultimately pour everything inside me, out. From this, I learned that I cannot do everything alone. So, I stopped trying to be all ‘stoic’ Katie and started expressing myself through written and verbal communication. Further, tell them. Tell your main support person when you are in a funk. It’s only fair to you to have your needs met, but also for them. If you need space, tell them. If you need a hug, tell them. If you just need to vent without advice, tell them. If you need them to put the kids down tonight, tell them. You’re not a superhero; you’re a human. Overworking is the only addiction that we praise. Just pause and make yourself a priority. It is only then you can be who you want to be for those loved ones around you.
There’s great truth to the quote “we don’t know what we don’t know” and this is what I’m doing here with this blog post. I’m using my own personal experience—one that no one else in the world has (it’s even different than my brother, my sister, and mom who were in the same room when my dad died)—as a possible catalyst to bring your own Self to the forefront of your mind.
And I’m just going to say one last thing—I’m finally where I want to be. The past year has been incredible due to the fact that I am listening to what my body is telling me. Whether it comes to my diet, sleep, relationships, self-love, being a mom, mindset, or mental health, it’s just been on par with who I want to be.
But the great paradox this comes with is that I sense this Fall is going to be a season of truly letting go. The grief I’ve buried the last 13 years is coming up and I’m expecting a day soon that all I do is cry, scream, journal, what have you. With this day coming up, I’m just so grateful that my body and brain have protected me. What I mean by this is all your brain is trying to do every single day of your life is protect you. It’s how we’ve survived all these years.
All I’ve wanted is to grieve—like truly do it. But subconsciously, my brain and body knew it wasn’t the time or place. To truly heal, you can’t force it. You must learn to roll with the resistance. I finally feel safe in my own skin, so memories from my life that have been locked away to protect me are surfacing, which is honestly pretty freakin’ cool. It’s going to hurt, but I know I’ll have a deep hole to fill with nothing but gratitude—previously occupied by grief.
Happy Fall, y’all. And happy healing 🙂
Katie
