When You Dread a New Season

What do you do when the stage is set for a transition in seasons, but you dread the season ahead even more than the heartbreakingly painful one you’ve just walked through?

Often, the beginning of a new season comes with a sense of excitement and anticipation. With the allure of new possibilities and fresh starts. It presents a chance to start over with new habits, new motivations, and new goals.

I’ve often felt this excitement during a transition myself. At the beginning of a new school year, a new job, or a birthday that signals a new year of life. Particularly in the last few years, I’ve longed for a change of seasons. It’s been one of those periods where one trauma piles on top of another until it feels like I’m playing whack-a-mole with life—dealing with one situation only to have two or three more pop up, uninvited and unexpected. At every turn in the road, I’ve thought that what lies around the bend has to be better. And each time, I’ve been sadly surprised by the same types of situations on repeat, like an inescapable loop in a horror movie I just can’t seem to find a way out of.

Another bend looms in the distance, but this time, I’m approaching things differently. Instead of rejoicing at the possibility of a new season about to start, I find myself dreading the threatened season’s commencement far more than I welcome it. This leaves me with one question: When you find yourself at such a place in life, how should you handle it? The best answer I’ve been able to come up with is accepting the past while holding space for the future.

There are days when panic rises. When the painful memories make me want to disconnect my brain. When I just can’t stomach the thought of accepting that certain difficult circumstances are part of my story.

But it is only in owning these painful parts—accepting them as a season in my life and a part of my past—that I have any chance of exiting the cycle of struggling to forget so I can begin to forge a firm foundation for future growth.

Stopping there, however, would be simply depressing. While holding acceptance in one hand, I must also hold onto hope in the other by remembering that every season of life is simply a chapter, not the entire story. Things can and will change, as this is the nature of life. Even as there will be hard moments to come, there will also be joyous ones filled with light, life, and love. Those precious moments are worth holding on for, and the season ahead is bound to hold at least some of them, hard though it may be.

Remembering this, I will do my best to learn from what this chapter has to offer. I will seek to make the most of where I’m currently at. I will strive to meet the season ahead with acceptance and hope held hand in hand, anchoring me firmly in the present moment. Because it’s part of my story, but not the ending.

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