Do I have to write off November?
This time last week I went to write a post, and then realised that this post from a year ago summed up all that I wanted to say. I’ve shared it again below if you want to read it, but in summary, as the beginning of November was when Bethany became ill before her death on the 25th of the month, each subsequent November is one in which I’ve wanted to hibernate, the memory of that time creating a painful, visceral and embodied recreation of the experience. This was, in the past two years, made worse by November always being a busy and stressful work month, and the complex traumatic link I will always have between being overworked at this time of year and not being able to spend as much time with her as I could have.
I’ve spent the past week considering whether this is inevitable. Will November always be a month I have to write off? A month in which I just accept I will struggle, feel miserable, and want to hide away? In Breathe Magazine, the article When Nothing’s a Pleasure, describes Anhedonia as a loss of enjoyment in life, which is different from feeling sad and includes numbness and a reduced interest in socialising, and can be present in mental and neurological conditions such as PTSD and depression. As with many other of my experiences with grief, there is link between anhedonia and our hormones. Stress releases cortisone, which dampens the effects of feel good chemicals such as dopamine, and means your brain bases how it will feel in the future on how you currently feel, thus underestimating how much you will enjoy something. Tanith Carey, in her book Feeling Blah, recommends a technique called Behavioural Activation, in which you do something you used to enjoy as a way of feeding your brain some more positive inputs, with the effect of getting your feel good chemicals back in balance.
This is something that Dr Alex George recently shared in an Instagram video in which he explains how a sad brain tricks us into thinking that we have to be happy first to enjoy the things we usually enjoy, whereas what we should be doing is asking ourselves “what would the happy version of me do?” and doing it anyway, whether we feel like it or not. I’ve linked to his video here.
I have my 50th birthday at the end of this month, and I think that has partly been the reason why I have started to explore whether I can have a different sort of November this year. As Bethany died only five days before my birthday, there will always be a link between these two key events, but if I want to celebrate my birthday, can I also find moments of celebration in the lead up to it this year, in a way that I haven’t been able to before?
A coaching session and two conversations with friends this week have also helped me to start thinking that maybe there is another way to approach my November this year. They helped me to be intentional about building in restorative and therapeutic things over the next few weeks, to in some small way start to reclaim this month rather than writing it off as an inevitable month of Anhedonia.
Another helpful insight came from John Robins, who in his podcast with Ellis James discussed how he changed from thinking “I’m always going to feel like this” when he felt sad to recognising that emotions are temporary things, which ebb and flow, go and return. You can watch a clip from it here.
So while I know that November will have its moments of sadness, I’m going to try and do the things that I know make me happy, as well as those basic self care things that Dr Alex George outlines that our brain tricks us into thinking are a waste of time, and hope that this will help me get through a difficult month while also being able to find moments, however small, of fun or calm, of celebration and peace. I hope that if you are in a difficult place, you can find some of these moments this month too.