December Survival Ingredients

Decembers usually arrive with confusion.

Here in the Northeastern US, the sun starts setting when it feels like afternoon has just begun, and we scramble to remember where our coats and gloves are. It causes a fundamental disorientation that isn’t helped by very stimulating light displays in public places, stores and throughout neighborhoods.

From where I am perched, it’s even more dizzying.

I’ve emerged from my most intensive mental health treatment period of my life into a month that functions as a waiting room for more political repression. In this room, stuffy but somehow big enough to contain grocery stores, people who don’t have any extra funds to play around with see those barely existent dollars evaporate when buying food for just a few days.

Also we are told to make merry, buy non-edible things and visit a lot of people in a short span, without mention of face masks or other protocols that would help contain a novel virus that’s still causing widespread harm.

Grasping all that December seems to announce and demand is hard when I have conditions (of the mental health variety) and I have conditions (on the environments I’m willing to enter).

Still, I value having survived this far into December, and the act (art) of survival itself. At the end of these updates I plan to share some practical ideas and resources.

I am not a mindset girly so I tread gently and apologetically here. There are a zillion caveats to including ‘mindset’ into one’s winter survival mix. It isn’t going to fix the state of being kept down by systemic forces. I also raise eyebrows at the practice of criticizing a ‘scarcity mindset’ in people actively experiencing scarcity.

So I’m not about to go full-on Love and Light, but ‘mindset’ is the best word I can come up for the filter in my thinking, which it took eight weeks of therapy to achieve. I was able to look at the distressing parts of my reality and consider that they might be temporary, and to see past them to what I am trying to build. It made it easier to bear some barren weeks.

For this one I’m going to take you into my kitchen. It’s got a newly potted, struggling basil plant. The kitty cat zooms across its floor when she hears the refrigerator door open, hoping to get a bit of deli meat.

We’re here because one of the best illustrations I have for getting through these days is trying to make mung bean omelettes, a time-honored source of non-egg morning protein, not loving how they came out, but then on two separate nights realizing it would make sense to use the same main ingredient for moong dal. The end result was the most aromatic, comforting warm food for those evenings, and this makes me think of being scrappy, using what’s there to create coziness.

Not too far from the kitchen is the table used for drawing, inking and coloring some portraits that were my version of holiday gifts this year. This idea came late, but it took me from feeling helpless to capable.

These are anchors from the time capsule of a week when it’s hard to be festive but helpful to find joy. In times ahead, personally and universally, the mood will dip, but this auntie’s goal is partly to record what has worked and talk about how it felt. And I’m sure others have survival technologies and spirit soothers I’ve yet to learn, which makes it exciting to see what emerges in the next month (year).