in my "flop" era

notes on feeling behind and getting back up

Bo Bartlett

Most of 2022, I felt like I was in a ‘flop era’. A period marked by failure, lack of success, or inability to function or thrive.

This year: I fell seriously ill with an autoimmune issue for 7 months, got misdiagnosed by 3 different doctors, was given the wrong medication for half a year. Was in pain most of the time. Left the country. Huge flop.

But also this year: I prioritized writing and I shared more than ever before. I moved on from heartbreak, let myself be open to the possibility of love again. I was consistent, focused. Made new friends who I admire and respect. I redefined what beauty meant to me. Big wins.

Our lives are always at a tenuous balance between flops and wins. Otherwise known as: the valleys, the peaks. Fragmentation; wholeness. Darkness; lightness. Winter; spring. Getting lost; being found. We’ll wrestle this duality for most of our lives.

I’m still learning that one of the best and hardest parts about being young in a big city is that things always change. When I was happy, god I was so happy. Then the next moment things shifted, everything I loved felt different. I thought we’d be friends for life, now we don’t speak. I didn’t know you existed at one point and now I can’t imagine being without you. I was so healthy and then suddenly very sick. It’s hard to calibrate. What’s temporary or permanent? I move every single year and find it hard to pack light. All these seasons pass through me. My summers, my winters. All I can do is adapt, adapt, adapt my way through it.

Today I’m walking through the forest near my home. All my sharp edges loosen and uncurl here. My nervous system is always calm when I’m proximate to nature. There’s something powerful in the way nature consumes you. It makes you feel like the smallest, most alive thing in the world.

Trees elsewhere in the world yield their leaves. Brace for the cold. People in wintertime tuck themselves into their interior worlds. A lit candle, a warm drink, a bright screen, a film muffled in the distance.

I still remember my first moody, sludgy, grey-ice winter in the East Coast. I was so improperly dressed. I wasn’t prepared. I was wearing like 5 T-shirts on top of each other. Eventually I got a thick jacket. Winter was winter. I couldn’t keep acting like I was living in a different season than I actually was.

A flop era really feels like one long winter. Emotionally, it feels like dressing up for the wrong season: feeling uncomfortable, cynical, and out of place. Everything is slush puddles. Everything is winter.

I found the concept of ‘Wintering’ by Katherine May a valuable reframe (Thanks J!):

We are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death in which we mass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is a brutal untruth. Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.

May advocates for the active acceptance of sadness. Knowing that winters are frigid, but help us grow the deepest roots.

Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.

Flop eras are full of failure, setbacks, regret, heartbreak.

Part of the pain is not knowing when it gets better. Being at the mercy of ambiguity. Who will I be on the other side? Will I stay the same? Will I be unrecognizable? When will this get better? When will I feel normal again?

Ambiguity hurts when we get too used to certainty. I’ve always been good at executing. Not so good at stewing in the unknown. But if I look back: every blurry, painful thing allowed me to experience myself more clearly. It was worth occupying ambiguity to get there.

Most things in life you truly care about are likely to be very ambiguous, and if you can’t foster some ability to make room for ambiguity, you’re likely to be doomed to act in the service of its elimination — which is a really fancy and roundabout way of saying that you’ll feel and suffer from anxiety much of the time (Kelly Wilson)

In a world that prizes progress, speed, competition, it’s easy to feel left behind or frozen in your own little winter.

But I really believe flop eras are inherently necessary and a character building stage of life. We must bear the flop era to get to the thriving era. Painful experiences are just portals to the deeper self.

Ursula Le Guin: “If you evade suffering you also evade chances of joy…. The thing about working with time, instead of against it ...is that it is not wasted. Even the pain counts.” (shared via Justine from KC #32)

What’s peace to me now? Going at my own pace. It’s taken me so long to learn how to take my time: loving what I love and doing what I do. When life knocks the wind out of my chest, simply getting up again is a small triumph. I’m exiting my flop era. Changing of the seasons. I keep my heart open through it all.

-N.

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PS: Happy holidays. What era are you in? Hopefully you are all thriving :) You might also like internal confidence or you can have everything - both essays talking about trusting yourself and finding the right timing.

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Quote of the Week

Rebecca Solnit:

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.

French Song of the Week