Winter Katy needs different things than Summer Katy, and life got a lot easier once I stopped asking one to behave like the other.
Summer Katy wakes up before her alarm because she wants to.
Winter Katy wakes up because apparently adulthood requires participation by 8:00am.
Summer Katy wants to host people on the patio.
Winter Katy would like everyone she loves to know she cares deeply about them and will happily see them again in April.
Summer Katy thinks a walk after dinner sounds lovely.
Winter Katy has already put on her pajamas, brushed her teeth, and mentally closed for business by 6:17 p.m.
Summer Katy starts gardens.
Winter Katy starts soup.
Summer Katy wants to play golf, learn watercolor, and eat tomatoes off the vine while hosting workshops and reorganizing the garage.
Winter Katy wants a blanket.
Possibly a second blanket for the first blanket.
For years, I treated these as competing versions of myself.
One was productive and optimistic and social.
The other was lazy and antisocial and difficult.
Guess which one I thought needed fixing?
Every winter I made plans for the person I become in July.
Networking events.
Evening commitments.
Goals.
Projects.
A social calendar that looked adorable in November and felt personally offensive by January.
Then I would spend the rest of the winter wondering what was wrong with me.
Why couldn’t I just power through?
Why couldn’t I be more disciplined?
Why did everyone else seem capable of existing after sunset?
Eventually I realized something that changed everything.
Winter Katy isn’t broken.
She’s seasonal.
I rise and set with the sun more than I ever realized.
Summer Katy Is an Overachiever
Give me those absurd Wisconsin summer days where the birds start chirping before 5 a.m. and the sun hangs around until almost 10 at night and I become the most motivated person you’ve ever met.
I wake up excited.
I have energy.
Ideas.
Plans.
I somehow become convinced I can fit three lives into one day because there is still light left and we should probably use it.
Take away the sunlight and I become suspiciously similar to a bear preparing for hibernation.
Honestly, I should probably stop being surprised by this.
It has happened every single year of my adult life.
I have seasonal affective disorder.
I am medicated; double dosing starts in October.
I take vitamin D; double dosing starts in October.
I own a light box.
All of those things help.
But what helped most wasn’t medical.
It was expectation management.
I Stopped Treating Winter Katy Like a Problem to Solve
I stopped treating Winter Katy like a problem to solve and started treating her like someone I knew.
Winter Katy needs:
- fewer evening commitments
- more books
- more sleep
- more soup
- more candles
- fewer expectations
- more sunlight
- permission to stay home
Summer Katy needs:
- sun
- gardens
- projects
- people
- patios
- long walks
- open windows
- possibility
Neither version is more real than the other.
Neither one is winning.
Neither one is failing.
They’re simply responding to different conditions.
Which is why I think January resolutions are complete nonsense.
Absolute insanity.
Every year we collectively decide that January is the perfect time to reinvent ourselves.
And the we I am referring to clearly does not live in the Northern Hemisphere from October through March.
Because if they did, they would know this is an absolutely unhinged time to ask people to become their best selves.
The sun sets during afternoon snacks.
Every living thing in Wisconsin is simply trying not to freeze to death.
We are fish-belly white and operating on approximately fourteen minutes of daylight and holiday cheese.
Yet somehow this is the season we’ve chosen for reinvention.
January is not self-improvement season.
January is survival season.
Trees aren’t setting growth goals in January.
Gardens aren’t launching new initiatives.
Bears aren’t joining CrossFit.
Nature seems to understand that winter is for conserving energy.
Humans are the only ones insisting we should bloom year-round.
Personally, if I were redesigning the calendar, New Year’s Day would happen sometime around April 15th.
The birds are back.
The windows are open.
The daffodils are coming up.
Hope has returned.
My personality has returned.
I would run through a wall for an April goal.
For years I thought I was bad at resolutions.
Turns out I was just making them during the wrong season.
Winter Katy Needs Different Things
These days I know better than to ask Winter Katy to behave like Summer Katy.
I don’t schedule much socially from November through February because I know myself.
I stockpile books in October like I’m preparing for a natural disaster.
I lean into soup season.
I buy candles like emergency preparedness supplies.
I stop apologizing for wanting to stay home.
And every spring, almost without fail, she comes back.
The woman with all the energy.
All the ideas.
All the plans.
Turns out she wasn’t gone.
She was just waiting for more daylight.
If your January resolutions quietly died sometime around February, maybe you didn’t fail.
Maybe your body simply wasn’t interested in becoming a new person in the emotional equivalent of nighttime.
That realization is exactly why I created Resolution Redo.
Not because your goals don’t matter.
Because maybe they deserve to be revisited when your body finally agrees to participate.
🎟️ Permission Slip
Permission to stop asking Winter You to behave like Summer You.
Different seasons require different versions of us.
That isn’t inconsistency.
That’s wisdom.
