This Season’s Shadow Side

On scheduling, boundary setting, and leaning into darkness

Photo by Kaja Kadlecova on Unsplash

This time of year, social media floods with commentary about the days getting darker, the sads setting in. People mourn the loss of light, resent the changing of clocks. They view the shorter days as time being stolen from them. Meanwhile, I can feel my soul crouching Gollum-like as the darkness closes in—when the edges of the world soften with fog, with frost, with blues and grays—and all I can think is: my precious.

For me, the onset of winter is an exhale. Gone are the frantic summer days when I was trying to cram everything in, and in their stead are cozy evenings by the fire, intimate conversations over steaming bowls of ramen, the solitude of soggy hikes along unpeopled trails—at least, that’s what I crave come the colder days. What usually happens, though, is that my schedule threatens to fill up just as obscenely as it did in summer.

“You’re the busiest person I know,” is a refrain I often hear from loved ones. And I can’t argue with them, for I happen to be the busiest person I know. In fact, I can only think of one other person in my life who’s social, family, work, and community commitments rival my own. Over the years, I’ve gotten better at setting boundaries, saying no, and scheduling my time so I don’t wear myself ragged. Historically, though, around this time of year, my calendar would seem as daunting on Santa Claus’s on Christmas Eve, like I would need to defy the laws of physics to tend to it all.

I’m not complaining about the gift of a brimming social cup. It’s something I work hard to nurture. But as an ambivert with a winter soul, these dark days reconstitute parts of me that rely on solitude and rain. I’ve never understood the impulse to vacation to warm, tropical locales this time of year. I’d rather lean into the darkness than try to escape it.

“It is the animal in us that knows the dark,” writes Nina MacLaughlin in Winter Solstice. “This season stirs that animal in us, and stirs the memories, ones that live in all of us, submerged so deep, of the ancient dark, of a time before gods, before form and words and light.”

As the aperture of each day winnows, I can feel myself sinking more deeply into an old, vital rhythm. My body wants to burrow. My brain wants to rest. The scales of light and dark must rebalance themselves, so I let the darkness weigh on me.

Don’t misunderstand; I revel in the brightness of this season, too—candlelight, game nights, sitting at long tables with loved ones, baking pies, stringing up Christmas lights—I just think there’s something to be found in the shadows. This time of year, especially, I lean toward the “melancholic direction,” as Susan Cain calls the “tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world.” In her book Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, she writes that living in the melancholic direction means recognizing “that light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired.”

Preserving this duality is my goal each time I sit down with my paper calendar to plan the shape of my days and weeks. My husband and certain friends view my allegiance to analog scheduling as downright archaic and borderline deranged. My method, though, carries a logic. It preserves my ability to be thoughtful about how I spend my time. When friends pull out their phones to schedule time together, I confess to them that I must wait until I’m home to refer to my planner. When people text me to hang out, I sometimes wait days before responding because I want to carefully think through my calendar before committing. This has given me a reputation for being a frustrating person to plan with, but it has also preserved my shadow side—the part of me that depends on melancholy and time alone for my own survival. I analyze each week and move the puzzle pieces around, creating space for hibernation and evenings to myself, for solo outings and abundant sleep.

This is a difficult season for many people. In my own life and in the lives of those close to me, loved ones have died. Hearts have been broken. Illness has set in. It can all feel like too much to bear. But I would rather feel the weight of it than pretend it isn’t there. The dead deserve our tears. Our hearts must sink to understand the depth of loss. Our bodies need rest to repair themselves. There is grief in winter and I move toward it—because that’s the only way through.

So, the next time you’re trying to plan something with me, don’t take it personally if I take a while to respond or need to reschedule. The likeliest explanation for my unavailability is that I have a hot date with darkness.