70 days of winter exhaustion

So, it's cleary January; yesterday I had my first day of being completely unable to want anything for this winter. In a sense, this is good news; usually that happens about a month earlier.

Winter can be so pretty (Although to be fair I took that photo in April) but it's consistently disastrous for my mental health. When I can get out of here to someplace with liquid water, where I can be more physically active, that helps. But I'm not likely to be able to this year. My physical health was so bad in the fall that I couldn't plan anything. It's actually improving now, so maybe at some point in February I'll just get in the car and drive somewhere warm. But I also have a lot of stuff to do here, and while I could pack up my whole kaboodle of Steem keys I loath thinking about what would happen if I got my tablet stolen.

If you haven't been through literally wanting nothing, I think it's difficult to explain how difficult that can be. I'm boggled by Buddhists who have this as their goal. I have to develop rote methods for things like eating, because I cannot come up with a preference. We make a lot of choices in our days, almost all of them with some reference to our preference, and working around not having one is surprisingly difficult, even with many years of experience.

Part of what those many years of experience have taught me is that this will inevitably end sometime in early March. That's why I have 70 days in the title; all I have to do is get through 70 days, and it will be better. It might even be before that; some years it has even managed to happen in the last couple of days of February. But I know it's going to suck for a while, and more importantly, I know it's going to stop.

But I'm also going to be less effective. It's hard to make goals, but I can still follow goals I set before, and December was very good for that this year; I have no shortage of goals and tasks on my list, that don't really require any internal decisions behind them. Over the years I've taught myself to trust my past self on what I want to be doing, and it tends to turn out ok most of the time.

(The year I got into a new romantic relationship heading into this period was... interesting. Not something I want to repeat. Although also not a person I ever want to see again.)

My productivity tends to come in fits and starts all the time, but it's at its strongest during the winter. It's very hard for me to be able to predict when I will be able to accomplish anything on even the smallest level. I know there are already a couple of people waiting on things from me right now, and I'm hoping to get to those soon. But everything is like wading chest-deep through cotton candy right now, and it's going to be that way for a while. I don't generally mind being reminded of things that I'm supposed to be doing/have done, but in this state I more or less require it; you can consider this a direct request to tell me if I've lost something, because I know I will be losing things. I want to get them done, so sticking them in front of my nose again is a good thing.

The main thing at this point is getting through; knowing that spring will eventually come and I'll have initiative and preferences coming out of my pores again. Until then it's just a matter of doing what I can and hopefully people giving me a bit of a break when I can't.