The Gentle Season

Lately, I have been carrying things differently.

I've been a little gentler lately, with other people but also with myself. I noticed it first in small things. The extra moment before deciding what someone meant. The mistake I didn't spend the rest of the day turning over. The conversation I let end without needing to settle every part of it. None of this felt particularly significant while it was happening. I only realized later that something had shifted.

Recently, something happened with someone I love that brought up more than the moment itself called for. Old hurts. People who weren't in the room but showed up anyway. It ran the full cycle. I felt it through my whole body, in my chest first, and then the crying came.

I've been here before. But what I did with it was different this time. When my thoughts went back to it, I moved them somewhere else. Again an hour later. Again the next day. The hurt came and I let it be there, and then I let it go. Not because it stopped mattering. Because I didn't want to keep carrying it. And I didn't give myself a hard time for being hurt, or for not sounding quite like myself for a few days.

A week like this one used to stay with me much longer. This time it just kept going. I slept, I got up, I went about my days. The hurt got quieter, and the feeling in my chest began to settle, too.

Somewhere in all of that, I started noticing it elsewhere, too. I've been giving people more room, and small disappointments are easier to leave where they are.

When I say this is a gentle season, I don't mean I've arrived somewhere. Things still get to me. They just don't stay with me in quite the same way.

In gentleness,
S. Marie
C U M I C H E