Acts of Love: Next Year I'm Taking January Off

Notes from the brink of burnout

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Recently I read a post in which someone on substack said that they like to set aside January as a fallow month, to have days in which they lit the wood burner, and all they had to do that day was keep the fire going. Frustratingly I now cannot remember who said it. If you know, let me know so I can credit them. Whoever it was, that line opened up a deep longing in my mind, and I have returned to it regularly in what has been a crushing January.

At the beginning of the year my mum was diagnosed with stage three cancer. It’s inoperable, but we are going ahead with an intense month and a half of daily radiotherapy treatment in a hospital which is an eighty mile round trip away. I’m hoping to drive her and look after her for most of those trips, which means shuffling all work out of the way in January, alongside the usual slog of funding bids and tax return, and cancelling a lot of my paid work for the next two months. It’s not ideal, but it’s necessary. I want to be with her. I want to be with her in a way that is entire; a wholeness of self. If I had stage three cancer and someone on hand who could, albeit with some stress, shuffle things around to offer themselves to me, what would I want that person to do for me while I was walking so close to death? I’d want them to unburden me of the structure of life, the niggling, necessary stuff; the bills and post, the driving, the meal making, the washing and ironing and scrubbing of bath and toilet, the feeding of chickens. I’d want them to carry that burden and be aware that when I wanted to feel normal and a part of society, when I was sick of being defined by cancer, I could take some of those tasks back, and when I wanted to go inside myself to face the thing, I could hand them over again.

I need to remove the majority of my work schedule to do that, because I will not have enough ‘sponges’ left over to cope with this and work. If you didn’t know, I run my life based around a concept similar to spoon theory, but using sponges.

Sponge theory

When I imagine myself overwhelmed and burnt out, it is like seeing myself as a container that has no more room left in it. Everything is spilling out of it erratically and uncontrollably and messily. Everything in the world, if you are an odd brain person, is a test of discomfort - how much discomfort you can cope with before your brain stops working. I manage to exist in the world by wearing a metaphorical* suit of sponges that soak up the discomfort I feel as someone with an odd brain, and quite bad anxiety (social anxiety mainly). The sponges soak up the discomfort of situations I am in until they are full, and then that discomfort spills out and becomes an inability to function well. I probably start the day with about ten nice dry discomfort-sponges, if I’m rested and well. My sponge allocation system might look like this:

• Driving to unknown places - 2 sponges

• In person event - 4 sponges

• mild confrontation (sending invoices, turning down work etc) 2 sponges

• Phone call - 1 sponge

• Zoom meetings - 2 sponges

• Running in person sessions, courses, mentoring etc approx 2 sponges per hour

• Planning courses or filling in forms - 4 sponges

• Emotional meetings - 2 sponges

I want to be clear here, I could just choose to not do any of this stuff and avoid most of the discomfort. Nobody is forcing me to do this; I could go back to doing factory work, which actually used very few sponges and was therefore a really good experience, for me, but that’s not who I am. I am a writer. And the discomfort of the writer-life comes along with a huge sense of joy and nourishment. I love my life, I love working with people, I get so much out of the writer-life, but that doesn’t actually offset the discomfort. This is what a lot of people perhaps don’t realise about it, it’s not really just a case of getting used to the nerves, or offsetting the discomfort with the joy. The discomfort is just there, it can’t be treated or cured or disappeared, it has to be managed alongside the joy.

Because I can see that a lot of other people do not seem to be living their lives in a complex, imagined sponge system, I am constantly comparing myself to them, and inwardly criticising myself for not fully being a part of the literary community, not being able to be at live events etc. I would love to do a writing retreat for example, but it would be impossible to manage the sponges. There is one particular type of retreat that lots of writers I know attend, but it involves cooking with and eating with people daily. That’s all my sponges gone in one fell swoop. I’d be in bed most of the time instead of feeling nourished and joyful.

I’m quite proud of myself for looking at how much my mum’s illness and treatment will take, from a sponge point of view, and making sure I manage the sponges well. But also at the same time, I’m very much like WTF, who has to imagine their lives in a series of sponges in order to exist in the actual world? Something here probably needs to change.

What I know is this. I want to be wholly there for my mum, and have enough space in my life to take on the discomforts of her life. I want to experience this with her.

My world, my non-sponge ruled world, is all about experience.

I feel sometimes that we forget to experience life. That we forget to experience the things that happen to us, and instead just focus on getting through things. I don’t want to really live my life just getting through things.

I am thinking about this when I come across Amy Jane Beer’s Country Diary piece: The Guardian

Light is never more magical than at this time of year.

Amy-Jane Beer

I think about how illness forces us to stop and recover and sometimes forces us to notice, to notice the light and to notice the change in the season and I want that, but I don’t want to wait until I am ill in order to experience it. I want a fallow month, I want a January where I just exist. I want to move through one month without needing a discomfort-sponge system in order to do that. Our work here, on this planet, in this life, is not to complete a game, or to fix something that is broken, it is to exist and be aware of that existence.

What if, I ask myself, instead of the usual slog through January, which even without my mum’s ill health is always a time of grinding feelings of failure and resentment because - tax return, funding bids, work.

What if, next January, I gave myself an act of love, as if I was ailing.

What if, in January 2026 I give myself a fallow month. What if I the person who removed all the discomfort and allowed myself to just be. A true fallow month. How would that work, on a practical level? Well, I’d have to cover a month’s wages for a start. Which means taking on a little more work each month to cover January. Which means considering carefully the monthly sponge situation. It means getting all funding bids and applications in before the deadlines, (sponges galore) it means getting my tax return submitted by November, (LOL) as it will be impossible to do it in December. It means turning down any work in January. Is it worth it, to have that time?

What would be the purpose of the month? Fallow time. The chance to, just once, experience what it is just to just be alive and in existence with the world. In the deepest, darkest month of winter. To hibernate. To heal.

I imagine a morning where I am not at my desk answering emails at 6am. Instead I am in my reading chair, and the curtains are open and I am drinking the good coffee, and I am staring out of the window at the deep purple and salmon of a winter sunrise, and I am allowing that sunrise to enter the room and move across me as I stay still and present. I am imagining a day in which I just take photographs of things and play with them, and follow an internal narrative around beauty and expression. I imagine myself lighting the stove and settling into my chair with nothing to do except keeping the fire burning. Maybe I write. Maybe I don’t.

Photo by Matt Seymour on Unsplash

How much of this is a fantasy that can’t be captured? How much of this is a little cry for help from me to me? How much of this can I incorporate into my life without needing to take a fallow month to recover from simply being alive in the world with all its stresses and strains?

There’s the crux. It’s not a fallow month I need, it is a better system of existing, a way of being in which I can use less sponges. I need to be able to live my writer life on my terms.

I will hold myself to this.

Until next time

x

*Did I need to tell you it was not a real suit? Probably not.