It's always around this time of year (at least where I live in Wisconsin) that we start to experience "the thaw" -- the days when the sun shines a bit brighter + the temperatures rise just above freezing. The ice melts. The snowbanks shrink.
It's a glorious shift -- this moment of remembering that winter will not, in fact, last forever because spring is coming!
But it's also kind of ugly.
All the trash that was buried under layers of ice + snow begins to resurface, a soggy mess littering the alleys + sidewalks. There's mud everywhere, sometimes flooding. Plus, the melting doesn't happening all at once -- the freezing + thawing goes back + forth, so surfaces often get more slippery + dangerous.
I was remembering this after a conversation with my therapist a couple days ago. After I spent most of the session crying for no particular reason, he said: "you know, I think you might be experiencing a thaw."
Sometimes when things have been frozen for awhile, the warming + melting can feel like a jarring jolt or overwhelming flood.
Sure, we're happy to be headed toward warmer days, but in the meantime, there's all of this trash to clean up, all of this flow to navigate, and all of this back-and-forth transition to manage.
This can look like all sorts of things:
We begin to emerge from a period of emotional stuckness or depression and all of our feelings also begin to reemerge (perhaps with a vengeance).
After being cooped up indoors to stay safe during a pandemic, we finally get vaccinated + begin inching back out into the world -- and feel all sorts of overwhelm + uncertainty around what that might look like.
We finally get to freedom + safety after a hard + scary period of trauma, which means there's finally space + bandwidth to actually look at the harm + begin to heal, which isn't easy.
When we're trying to survive a winter (of any kind), we're often just trying to make it through. Survival is often all there's room for, and there are all sorts of things we can't see, deal with, or begin to process until what's frozen begins to thaw.
And so when spring finally comes, that thaw might bring a lot with it. That's normal + okay.
So how might you take care of yourself not only in the frozen moments, but also in the thawing moments? What might it look like to be gentle with yourself when spring comes?