On Fallow Seasons

Watching Spring, Waiting for Spring. On Shame, Comparison, Jealousy, Adult Envy and Existentialism.

Hello friends. Open Heart Surgery is a newsletter devoted to exploring metamorphosis, unravelling, questioning and healing. I write essays and poems in service to personal and collective liberation - the personal, political, social, cultural and spiritual realms are all present here. This is a space for divergent thinking and for open hearts.

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It’s the late Spring here in Aotearoa. The days are slowly lengthening, the Spring rains are lessening, the sun’s rays are getting stronger, warmer, closer. Summer is on her merry way.

I’ve been quiet here for a while, both online and in reality. In some seasons, there is simply less to say. Last year, I published words on this Substack most weeks with ferocity and enthusiasm, despite the hell-storm I was navigating in my own life. This year, particularly the last six months, has slowed me down significantly. Perhaps my writing discipline just hasn’t been there, but I am also inclined these days to let fallow seasons be fallow.

In a world of incessant noise – so much of which feels utterly pointless – “content for content’s sake”, why add more? You don’t need my hot takes on culture. I really only want to write here if something deeper moves me to do so. Some seasons will be playful, sure, but others are for the quiet.

A friend from afar recently asked why I’ve been hiding in the shadows. I oscillate between expression and retreat often. Today, however, I have been forced to look my shame in the eye – the voice of failure in my head that has prevented me from wanting to share anything at all with anyone beyond my therapist and two close friends. Sure, I’m in a strange limbo season, waiting to see how several things pan out. But if I’m honest, there is also a part of me who is embarrassed about where I am and how long I have been here.

As good friends of mine know, or anyone who has been reading since I started this Substack, the last two years of my life have been turbulent, unforeseen, and deeply testing to both my sanity and resilience. It’s felt like a long, excruciating metamorphosis (which I am still observing), in which you just honestly hope to God that you just survive. Hope has flitted away regularly – bouts of severe depression and fatigue/chronic illness will do that – and I have been faced with every repressed shadow I’d apparently spent large chunks of my life running from. Saturn returned! And it has broken me!

- 35mm film by moi, messy art, 2024.

For a former overachiever child/adolescent/young adult – a late twenties breakdown/burnout/being diagnosed with chronic illnesses and ADHD – renders one with the Ultimate Sense of Failure. I know I’m not the only one who’s had a body or mind reach breaking point in these past years. Many of us, I suspect, are reckoning with the cost of running too fast for too long without repose (while getting rewarded and commended for doing so).

It’s strange to watch friends surge forward – into impressive careers, engagements, marriages, children, or glittering lives overseas. I know it’s only comparison speaking; everyone carries invisible hardships, even when their lives look perfect from afar. Still, to turn 30, be living with your parents, recovering from surgery, unemployed, fairly broke, just trying to get your baseline energy back while your peers dance through adulthood – is a weird place to be. Yes, this is all temporary. Still, it is odd and a little infantilising. If you were raised as an Overachiever, you will blame yourself for failing adulthood. It’s just how the trauma-wiring works, I don’t make the rules!

I do wonder if everyone in this weird thing we call adulthood is secretly comparing themselves to everyone else, wondering where they went wrong. (Or perhaps that’s just the perfectionists among us!) Comparison is a part of being human, as is jealousy, obviously. I joked to a good friend the other day that I probably wouldn’t be feeling these sharp stabs of insecurities, comparing myself to friends on totally different paths with totally different lives, circumstances and constitutions (which is everyone, truly) if I were living my best life as the wayward, free-spirited traveller friend, living in Colombia, practising my Spanish. (Travel and living abroad have always been one of my biggest dreams in life.)

In the happiest, most contented chapters of my own life, comparison is much quieter, or absent altogether. Currently, I am learning the grace (thank you, therapy), to allow myself to admit my own desires to myself – who doesn’t want to be healthy, energetic, financially stable, able to maintain healthy relationships, able to do work they value, and able to pursue the things that matter to them? If this is you, congratulations – you are my inspiration. My point is – nobody enjoys the feelings of jealousy or envy, but it does illuminate one’s desires. Jung called it the golden shadow – our disowned potential. For this reason, I think jealousy and envy can be very useful feelings, for the information they reveal.

I’m also able to recognise the privilege of healing – without dependents and without the chokehold of living in poverty. It takes a lot of resources to be well in this society. I regularly think of the philosopher J. Krishnamurti’s famous quote:

“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

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- 35mm film by moi, Raglan, Aotearoa, (West Coast), March 2025.

To circle back to the season of quiet – I have been healing slowly, offline and in relative solitude, with a lot of effort, whilst also quietly planting seeds I hope to see grow in the coming seasons of my life. I’ve been stripped back to bone over these last few years, as I rewire a fried nervous system and body and address the trauma/patterns that created illness, which has also exposed certain vulnerabilities.

I feel like a crab who has been stripped of her shell, who now has to grow a new one that will be completely different. It is an awkward and vulnerable process. I feel like I’m re-commencing my adult life again – with much deeper awareness, but also, it’s all new. This new decade marks a new life/era in a sense. Although some hope has returned, so has a deep sense of apprehension. So much of my old life and self have died or dissolved. It’s daunting to start everything over – habits, patterns, relationships, career, finances, home, and way of relating to the world and oneself.

A friend joked that this strange era of adulthood (the late twenties and early thirties) feels like a second adolescence. Your frontal cortex has developed, you’re more of an adult than you were at 20, but without the false bravado. You’ve lived in different places, with different humans, and are more aware of your preferences and quirks. You’ve probably fallen in love by now and have probably had your heart broken at least once, at least for the majority of us. Perhaps you now know how to take better care of yourself and are more aware of not only your strengths but also your vulnerabilities.

Life decisions now feel more consequential. Dating often leads toward the marriage-and-kids path; fertility declines; choices about where to live and work carry more weight. The body stiffens – you’re aging. Of course, we spend our entire life aging, inching towards death in the literal sense, but after your twenties, this somehow becomes more real. I’m acutely aware that the habits I practice now will have long-term effects – whether it’s starting to weight train for bone density and longevity, prioritising sleep as sacred, or better managing chronic stress that leads to so many negative health outcomes.

Astrologically, the theme of Saturn is responsibility and discipline. A Saturn return is therefore a slight ass-kick into another stage of adulthood – one where one’s limits, boundaries, sense of responsibility and need for discipline are made clear. Of course, we all mature at different stages in our lives, and some spend their twenties already burdened with responsibility, unable to take risks. My own twenties were more experimental; I lived many lives. I honestly don’t think that I could envision myself or my life past 30 in my early twenties. Currently, I am taking a much longer look at my own values and what an aligned, fulfilling life looks like to me personally.

I think we should always be aware of our mortality and intentional about the way we live our lives and the values we nurture – but some life stages are just more existential than others.

In the paralysis of choice, I think we fear regretting the path we take and the ones we don’t. There is also an inherent alienation and loneliness that comes with not doing the status quo. As friends marry, form families, and step into the stage of life society expects, I’m finding myself on the periphery of an experience I may never fully relate to. It’s odd. Like witnessing an intimate party from outside a window, knowing you will never be able to go inside.

These are not necessarily my life goals, nor desires, but it becomes isolating to not follow a typical script. As I am already witnessing, close friends with young children have very little extra space for the adult friendships and communities they maintained prior. Old friends are also scattered across the country and globe. Aging grants so many decisions. (At least if we are the ones deciding how parts of our lives go, the fate versus free will argument is eternal.) For those of us who desire wider families, strong community and adult friendships as much as romantic relationships – how do we build these with age within a culture of convention?

(Asking for ideas)…

I have no idea what my life will look like in five, ten, or twenty years, but I hope I don’t regret what I didn’t do or pursue. Which makes me think of Sylvia Plath’s famous quote:

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar.

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- 35mm film by moi, bush on Mount Karioi, Raglan, Aotearoa, 2025.

My inspiration for writing today was originally sourced from observing the cherry trees in blossom here. I was inspired to write a piece on the seasons and how briefly things actually bloom. Clearly, I’ve derailed, and this piece has become far more personal - but let’s now widen out to a seasonal metaphor. A cherry tree might bloom for one month out of a whole year, if that. The same goes for most flowers in Spring. One week, flowers abound, the next, green leaves have replaced them.

Nature only spends half of the year budding, blooming, and then in the full display of its leaves or fruits for summer. The other half of the whole year is devoted to shedding, and then laying bare, fallow. Though we know this is when trees are doing their most important inner work – everything necessary for future blossoms, fruit, and leaves. We just can’t see it externally.

Imagine if humans lived like this – as slowly and cyclically as everything else in nature – permitting ourselves to bloom or reach full productivity for only half the year. Or half the week. Or half the month.

I’m just dreaming here. Learning to be fallow for as long as necessary. It is so much less comfortable than productivity and ambition. You can spend your whole life avoiding yourself by being busy and driven and chasing goals (I did). As the monks of eternity have all told us, it is damn hard to be still and face yourself.

Anyway. I’ll be watching the cherry blossoms fall from their trees, watching summer come. Waiting. Growing my new shell. Waiting for my own Spring.

If you made it here, thanks for reading. I appreciate your time. In a world full of “life hacks” and optimisation tools, I hope this space provided you with an exhale. May we all learn to rest more, without guilt and without the need for permission.

Tell me if you can relate to any of these sentiments. Or the existential anguish.

With love,

Laura

- Cherry tree in blossom, source unknown.