Since it‘s a dark and seemingly endless November night that also has me trapped in bed with another Covid-infection, I think it‘s time to question my motivation, and my witch giggles. “Yes, that is what makes these nights easier”, she whispers into our midnight coffee.
Where were we?
My motivation to make it through the dark season?
My general motivation to do anything?
Actually, I think these two are connected.
Once, when I was much younger, I loved autumn. I had declared this colorful and passionate season my favorite one. I loved the red and the orange taking over the world, as well as the rain and the storms. I enjoyed the relief a hot drink could provide in these weeks, and I loved preparing for Christmas. Yes, I did. The weird goth girl that I was in my late teens, I loved Christmas. I loved baking with Christmas flavors, crafting little presents for people and to watch a cozy movie I would have loved as a child. I kept these traditions going as an adult for a very long time. The last time I handed around a little box with cookies and something I needle-felted to all my friends in the week before Christmas was only in 2019. I loved the dark season, because fighting the darkness could be so cozy. I loved the lights in the dark, the things we do to warm up a bit, my advent calendar on my night stand …
Recently, however, I cannot feel the same kind of joy anymore.
I cannot look forward to dark mornings with a hot chocolate, to watching childhood movies and planning out Christmas. Maybe, it‘s because I lost a lot of family members and friends lately and simply don‘t have so many people left to needle-felt little flowers for.
But I think there also is another reason.
I think, me not enjoying all my autumn things anymore simply shows that my old motivations do not work for me anymore. Or even, that my old way of motivating myself to do literally anything was never a good one.
I have recently lost a whole circle of friends and most importantly, my best friend, because he did something I could never forgive. Losing him made me remember why I let him so close in the first place, and I realized that his goal had always been to create a replacement family for him and his friends. Something that felt cozy and safe. Something that felt like home. I liked to have that in my life!
Before the pandemic, I was studying special education and working as a teacher. I loved children, I loved to be a person in their little worlds and I loved the first coffee early in the morning and in the teachers staff room, while preparing a short story to read or a game to place next.
It felt very cozy and it made me feel safe. I knew what to do, I had a kind of warmth in my life. I have recently found a colorful leave I had let dry in an old book in that exact autumn that I started studying special education. I had meant it as a promise to myself to never feel lost again.
All of the important things I did in life were motivated by finding a certain kind of coziness, of being safe! I was trying to preserve a feeling I was missing, and in doing so I let go of things that did not fit it and that in most cases was tragic.
When I think of the weird goth girl I was at the age of 16, I see her struggling to find this feeling anywhere in life, and so she creates it anywhere she can. She did the things that usually maybe a parent would have done with her and she reads the books and bakes the cookies that remind of the very few moments in her earlier life that someone actually did this for her. She created the illusion of having more people in her life than she actually had and tried to paint over her loneliness with the warm color of autumn leaves.
The sad thing is that I often let go of things that did not help with creating this one feeling I needed so much. It kept me from freely exploring what I wanted to do with my life, it kept me from writing and doing art, because these things were not safe enough. I even thought that I would be doing all of these things once I was older and had built a life that was wonderfully safe. Once I had a life in which everything was sorted out. In which I had a safe job, a lot more friends, was married and had 3 children – then I could do a few of these crazy things!
Once I had reached absolute safety, I could start to live, but that is not how life works.
In recent years, I could not enjoy all of these things I did to create a cozy feeling of safety anymore, and that means that my main motivation to do anything is extremely weak.
It needs to be replaced, and I don‘t know by what exactly, yet.
Mistress witch writes 