The Micro-Season Permission
What if nothing is wrong? What if you're just in winter?
No one looks at trees in January and asks if they've tried waking up earlier. No one suggests the bare branches are a discipline problem, a failure of mindset, something a better morning routine could fix. We understand, without effort, that dormancy is not the absence of life. It's the condition that makes the next bloom possible.
We grant this permission to everything except ourselves.
Modern work treats dormancy as pathology. The expectation is constant growth, constant upward trajectory—or at minimum, the performance of it. A slow quarter is a problem to solve. A fallow month is a gap to explain. The language we reach for is apologetic: I've been struggling, I'm trying to get back on track, I don't know what's wrong with me lately.
But what if nothing is wrong? What if you're just in winter?
There are three phases in any sustainable creative cycle: dormancy, bloom, harvest. Each is legitimate. Each serves the others. You cannot harvest what never bloomed, and nothing blooms from soil that never rested.
We permit ourselves bloom. We celebrate harvest. But dormancy—the fallow time, the inward turn, the season that looks like nothing from the outside—that's the phase we treat as failure. So that's the one worth defending.
Permission doesn't feel like relaxation. It feels like the release of the second layer—the tension of fighting the season you're actually in. The first layer is the tiredness, the slowness, the inward turn. That's just the weather. The second layer is the effort of pretending it isn't happening, performing productivity for an audience that isn't watching.
Permission is when the second layer drops. Shoulders you didn't know were raised. The exhale when you stop arguing with your own rhythm.
You're not suddenly rested. You're just no longer spending energy on resistance.
Not the fragmented hours of a single day, but the longer rhythm of phases. Some weeks are spring. Some months are January. The work isn't to escape the seasons—it's to stop pretending you're in a different one.
"I'm in a dormant phase" can be a complete sentence. Not the opening of a defense. Not a confession requiring absolution. Just a location. Just the weather report from where you actually are.
Sustainable creative practice doesn't require constant bloom. It requires the courage to be located—to say this is the season I'm in without apology, without the promise of imminent spring.
The dormancy isn't debt. You won't owe extra productivity later. It's just a phase doing what phases do: making the next one possible.
You can stop pretending now.
Sources: Renée Michaela creative burnout recovery
