Image credit: Hari Berrow
Hello, friends. It’s autumn, and autumn is my least favourite season. Perhaps that’s not true – I like the cold, dry evenings and walking around in the dark. I like the way the air feels different and fresher. I like the way everything feels new and somehow also nostalgic. I like the way everything reminds me of something else and also promises something more to life than there was before. I’ll be honest, I just don’t like the rain. I don’t like heavy rain you can’t walk through without your whole outfit getting soaked. I don’t like the misty rain that ruins the hair you just washed. I don’t like the fact that it’s too hot to wear a coat but too damp to wear a jacket. Living in Wales, this is the story of my life. Though, I think I prefer even the rain to the horrendous heatwaves we’ve had the last few years.
Now that I’ve handed in my dissertation for my Master’s in Mental Health Science, my mind is forced back to my PhD. I am looking to submit at some point in 2026 and, if I want to keep to that deadline, I need to put some serious work in. This month’s draft is a new addition to my plan (something that will enrage my supervisor, I’m sure): an autoethnography. For those of you that aren’t familiar with academic jargon, an autoethnography is when you analyse something in society through the lens of your own experience, supported by other research. In other words, something I do on here all the time. I’m not opting for it because it’s easy though, it’s not – it explores my history of mental ill-health and, in many ways, justifies the existence of my whole thesis. It is not a small thing. I have not yet really discussed my history of mental health on Substack, and today is not the day to dwell on difficult things. No, today is the day to reflect on the need for rest, which is the main thing that I’ve been doing recently.
While I was writing my first Master’s dissertation (yes, I’ve just finished my second Master’s – it was still cheaper than doing a full-time PhD), I was frustrated at how slow my progress was. I wasn’t getting the grades I wanted, I was still trying to keep my acting career alive (which I had given up on and grown to hate, but was too stubborn to let go of because I was still getting jobs), my grandmother had just died of a horrendous stroke, and I was burnt out. I was trying to write my first full play (producers, if you’re reading this, I have two ready and raring to go), and I was just completely unable to write a word. Writing had been there through all of my recent problems. When I had nothing else, I could write. I felt like my own brain had betrayed me. Again. It was shit.
I was bemoaning this to my mother in the car one day (probably a relief to her compared to the many other things I was bemoaning around that time) and she said something which has always stuck with me: a field can’t be fertile unless it’s been left to fallow. Meaning: get home and have a nap, stop wandering around in the middle of the night like a little vagabond and maybe then you’ll be able to write your bloody play. Covid came, and I had no choice but to fallow – to let random crap grow and wither and die and feed the soil inside my mind – and indeed the play did come.
A few years ago, Alicia Mwena Richins wrote a piece called ‘To Solve Climate Change, Rest is the Only Solution We Really Need’, and I couldn’t agree more. I may have talked about this before – my apologies if I have – but I really believe that half the reason over-consumption exists is because we are rushing all the time. We aren’t giving ourselves the option to make good choices, we’re overstretching ourselves and picking up extra resources to carry the weight with us. That piece was written in 2022 and we are all still so tired. Probably even moreso, because the universal game of ‘unpresented times bingo’ keeps making things weirder and weirder. We overconsume because it’s easier to get that bottle of coke to make sure we get home with at least one braincell intact than to remember to take our water bottle that smells kind of like mould even though we cleaned it 20 times out with us. How can you remember a water bottle when you are literally just barely ticking stuff off the list?
When I find my body asking for rest, I don’t refuse. I have the privilege of understanding what it means to have a mind that is broken, and I will not allow it to happen again. This makes working hard, and hours weird, and means I am probably not the most useful member of society. I have spent a long time and many hours being hard on myself over this, but I try to just let myself be now. It means I have more energy to do difficult things. It means I’m less likely to step over things I think are unfair, because I have more energy to challenge things. It means that I can make better choices for the environment (sometimes).
I’ll try to make the best of autumn, to make sure I go out on the dry days and enjoy the air that’s so unique to this season. I’ll try to make the best of the rain, and go for walks even when it’s drizzly (though maybe only on wash days). I’ll do the best I can to enjoy things and be present with this season that may or may not be terrible, but please forgive me if you find out I’ve taken to my bed – it’s not a rejection of myself or society, it’s my way of showing both how much I love them.