Shelter in Place

Never cut a tree down in the wintertime. Never make a negative decision in the low time. Never make your most important decisions when you are in your worst moods. Wait. Be patient. The storm will pass. The spring will come. 
— Robert H. Schuller, Tough Times Never Last, But Tough People Do! (1983)

There are predictable points in the year when my mental health worsens. Seasonal transitions are difficult for me, but late February into early March is especially hard. Winter has dragged on. The calendar insists that the light is returning, yet internally it does not feel that way. Energy drops. Motivation thins. My thinking shifts in tone and scale. I live with bipolar mood patterns, and these passages have always required more discipline than the steady stretches of the year. The danger is not only the darkness itself—it is what it tries to persuade me is permanently true.

In these dips, the mind becomes a revisionist. A hard week writing these reflections turns into evidence the whole project was a mistake. One piece of critical feedback dominates my attention while every meaningful response disappears. A strain in one relationship becomes proof that I have failed at connection broadly—not a particular difficulty, but a fundamental character fault. I feel purposeless, and the feeling files itself as fact. I assume people close to me are secretly noting the gap between who I say I am and how I am functioning. I ought to be further along by now. Further ahead at my job. My mental health ought to be more manageable at this point in recovery. And underneath all of it, the quiet catastrophizing that the darkness will not lift this time. This is just who I am now.

The thoughts seem coherent, arriving with urgency as if they demand action. The urgency becomes anxiety, and the anxiety feels like paralysis. I want to escape. Yet cognitive therapy offers a sober observation: acute mood states alter perception. Depression narrows the field of attention and retrieves darker material more readily. Aaron Beck, who developed cognitive therapy, called this the cognitive triad, a pattern of negative views of self, world, and future that feel true not because reality has changed, but because the filter has shifted. In bipolar management, clinicians give practical advice during episodes. Do not end relationships. Do not change careers. Do not rewrite identity. Wait until things stabilize before evaluating permanence.

For me, this has become a form of sheltering. Shelter in place does not mean pretending there is no storm. It means acknowledging that visibility is poor and that movement carries additional risk. During these weeks, my task is containment rather than transformation. I maintain routines, protect sleep, and eat predictably. I work at maintaining self-care and staying connected. I continue ordinary responsibilities without adding ambitious new ones. The temptation when energy drops is expansion—the mind wants to match its internal intensity with external change, to dismantle and rebuild in order to relieve the pressure. But decisions made under distortion can create consequences that outlast the state that produced them.

I have lived through enough late winters to know that this period always feels irrevocable while it is happening. It has never been. The season shifts. Perspective widens again. Remembering this does not eliminate the heaviness, but it prevents me from mistaking a temporary state for a final verdict. There is a difference between a passing mental pattern and the truth of my life. Not every season demands reinvention. Some require preservation. This one, for me, has become about holding ground.