A Summer Slump
I love summer: pool time, sunlight for early morning bike rides, grilling, vacation, and just generally not freezing. And also, there’s a new phenomenon that seems to have popped up and is making an unfortunate return this summer: the slump.
Last year felt unique as it centered on bigger life things: what direction am I heading? Who do I want to be when I grow up? You know, little stuff like that. So, I thought it was a one and done thing.
Then again this year, somewhere before all the fireworks went off, the slump slunk back in. Somewhere between the pool trips and bike rides and grilling and vacation, it like the Grinch, managed so slink through the activity and steal the ideas and momentum from my mind. When I’ve opened my laptop to write, I feel flat. And the words that do flow are a kind of spiral mind pattern I’m not unfamiliar with: wanting things to be different and then wondering why I want things to be different and can’t be happy with the status quo. If that sounds self-satisfying, believe me, I’ve spared you the thousands of words I’ve spilled in the same direction.
Some of it is still wrestling with life direction and some of it is wrestling with what I want this space to be. I love sobriety and recovery content: reading and writing. I wouldn’t be writing regularly (or at all) if I weren’t on this recovery path. And yet, there’s more out there to explore. I’ve always been a spiritual seeker, I’m searching for what a deep masculine connection can look like, and I’m also trying to be a better husband and dad. Plus, I just want to invite other folks into a similar connection to self that I’ve discovered once I put the booze down.
And yet, all those options can kind of feed the slump because part of me wonders what I have to add to the conversation on any of it. I get this is a part (thanks Internal Family Systems), and yet, it can be pretty vocal. Maybe this is helpful if you’re in a similar mental summer slump, even if it’s not about writing.
Who knows when the slump will end, but I’ll leave you with a hastily written draft of a poem that stirred at the end of one of those epic mental spiral writing sessions:
To return would be to die, I can’t risk that. The old walls, which at one time felt so safe and expansive, Now seem dark and dim and dank. Nothing against those walls, I needed to explore and push through them to discover this new landscape, To find a new horizon, A deeper dream, A love unending, Compassion unfolding, Growing, Expanding, Unpredictable, yet consistent. And yes, contraction, I have not bypassed this body and this very human existence. Here, too, lie treasures to unearth, a path to discover. Salvation isn’t otherworldly, It is here, now. In the depths of my heart, The desires of the body, The yearning for another, for connection, for union. Here, too, is a form of salvation. A calling out of myself, An eternal reminder that I am not alone, Not broken, Not dead. No, further on into the unknown Along the pathless path Which many have followed before And many will follow after Fellow pilgrims on this sojourn of spirit and body. To what end is not mine to know. Only to walk. For today, for this moment, This is enough.
I feel ya! ‘25 has felt like one long slump to me and I’m working hard to break free from it as we speak