Preparing for Hibernation

My fallow year started last winter into early spring. I didn’t realize what was happening at the time because burnout was still creeping up like a sneaky bitch and I was fixated on wrapping up my last contract discussions in Hollywood while planning next steps. Also, the world was on fire and my country began its grim decline into fascism—so I was distracted, as many were.

When my fallow season hit, I was totally unprepared to be knocked off my feet. It shouldn’t have surprised me. I know well that we cannot be in full bloom, a riotous profusion of output energy at all times indefinitely. There must also be a harvest. There must also be a dormancy to regenerate.
There is always a reset.

We live in a world that extolls the virtues of busy work, productivity and success. We don’t talk about the dormant periods required to maintain healthy individual seasons.

Ironically, though I wasn’t prepared for it, I am finding myself leaning into it with relief and gratitude as it has been long overdue.

Prior to getting involved with the Hollywood machinery, and before I was running a consulting firm—I used every winter to reboot, rest, read, create, write and hum along at a slower, more thoughtful and deeply feeling speed. I charged my batteries. I wrote a novel each winter. I sculpted, cooked, and puttered in my studio. Come spring I always emerged charged and ready to build, brimming with energy and creative projects ready for market.

Four years ago that all changed. My hibernation and regeneration window was co-opted by necessary business developments, emergency client meetings, “progress”, and growth.

​I don’t lament it at all. It was entirely necessary and I’m grateful I had the chance to build as much as I was able and put out the volume of content for Hollywood and my consulting clients that I did. But my friends and community worried out loud, “How long can you keep up this pace?”

There was ultimately a cost. Sometimes it was weeks on end of 120-hour weeks. Some weeks I worked from bed because I was also battling health issues stemming from the crush of deadlines and pressure. I was constantly in a battle to deliver on promises despite the fact so many contract providers failed their terms to me or didn’t show up—so I was picking up a lot of slack and continuing on to make those deliverables to customers and executives.

The important part was that I kept showing up, meeting all my obligations.

But my house was in disarray, the garden was rotting on the vine, and my finances were collapsing. The to-do list was stacking up. I was slowly drowning and the people who could help opted out.
I simply couldn’t do it all, or do it alone—and I was burning at every end to make it work.

It was always going to fall short, there simply wasn’t enough resource to go all the way in all the departments. There was neither enough bandwidth or money. There was not enough buy-in from the people who had the power to make the decisions—and I was the one holding the bag.

Early this year as the United States began its decline from first world country to backwater joke, I decided it was too much to try to push through all that noise and still hold onto all the reins all the time. For every step I made last year, each time I moved in ANY direction—someone or something else blazed in to knock that pathway out from under my feet. Each decision, each plan sabotaged by industry professionals, fickle minds and relationships, fragile egos, poor administrative decisions and executive orders, and even natural disasters.

I stopped being able to trust that any choice I made or step I took wouldn’t be interfered with, intentionally or unintentionally.

I couldn’t keep up with the chaos in all directions, so I began the process of closing down my consulting firm, and wrangling my energies toward writing and creativity. My house and property were teetering on foreclosure. I was losing contracts to the chaos of poor government leadership anyway. Companies feared hiring me because they didn’t know what other bullshit trainwreck decision the administration was going to make that would impact their bottom line and they didn’t want to be locked in a contract with me that they couldn’t fulfill. Both in consulting and in publishing and entertainment. The grant I was headed for was also cancelled before I could use it to stabilize my consulting firm. Money just dried up everywhere as panic set into both of the industries I was working in.

It was looking pretty bleak, not just for me, but for millions of other B2B providers.

I have not had a winter in four years and it shows. I look and feel rundown. My body shows the wear and tear, and my spirit feels it. My home is a mess and that is reflected in my appearance. The land has gone wild. Yes, I’m still in the woods. Yes, I’m still on my land for now. I have just enough energy and resources to tuck in and sustain a full hibernation cycle to close out that last bit of transformation and reset.

Don’t worry. There is a plan. I am not crawling in a hole to give up. I am simply acknowledging the much-needed personal season of my human psyche and physical form. This is self-care in the most necessary way. Four years without a hibernation has been costly in nearly every facet of my life.

I’ll get into the value of a fallow year later, but for now. Please be assured, I’m well. I’m provided for and the current plan is to not produce or be productive or build until the seed within begins to unfurl. Then, the new plan will go live. In the meantime, I’ll be sharing on my website what I do to regenerate. I will not be posting on a schedule or following pressure to produce. I will only be posting as I’m energized to do so, and sharing my process to re-invigorate, re-inspired, re-home myself in order to refurbish my creative fields and forests and prepare for a new spring. Follow along if you wish.

​I wish you a peaceful autumn.