Welcome to that in-between liminal week and a half between Christmas and New Year’s. Every so often we get lucky and score two weekends during this stretch, and this year is one of them.
This is one of my favorite times of the year. Despite the commercialization, this period is a rare cultural pause. A collective breath, if you will.
For me, it’s a time to live unarmored.
In past issues I’ve mentioned my affinity for video games and comic books as a kid. My favorite character is (still) Batman and one of my favorite depictions of him is when he’s in his cave with his Batsuit on… but without the helmet.
It’s one of the rare times you’d ever see him in that liminal, in-between state. We’re reminded he’s supposed to be human underneath all that superhero stuff:
While very few of us are billionaires that fight crime, there are parallels. All year, we don our armor and mask, leave our caves, and go out into the world to make our living, raise our families, and do whatever it is we do. We’re superheroes.
As time has gone by, I’ve learned to savor the unarmored life.
This stems a lot from how I grew up. My family wasn’t the “pizza night, movie, and pajamas” kind of crew. My more vivid memories were waking up to the sound of my parents fighting – over money, my father gambling, or parking the car on the front lawn instead of the driveway because he was drunk.
Home was a place I had to have my armor on. Without going into details, a lot of my junior high and high school years were spent being really protective of my mom and sister. I was always in “flight, fight, or freeze” mode.
Making Peace with Peace
My life today is very different, and I’ve engineered it to be that way: slow mornings, little-to-no drama, only choosing friends I find it easy to be unarmored with. I’ve lost taste for anyone who cannot self-regulate or puts me into a state of even mild chaos.
It’s been a lifelong journey to unlearn keeping my armor on all the time. For four decades, my system was always bracing for something, anything. Now I’m learning to make peace with peace.
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I still have major tendencies towards creating chaos, of course: overextending myself with work, holding space for people that I shouldn’t, carrying other people’s emotions.
Earlier in the fall, I conducted a little experiment with myself: I stopped texting people to check up on them for a few weeks. Then I took note of who checked up on me while I was radio silent. Outside of my family, there were only two friends. It was very interesting.
No, I’m not blacklisting anyone… what are we, teenagers? I just wanted to see which way the scales were tipped. It was revealing, and I committed to do a better job of being there for myself.
When it comes to work, being unarmored (for me) is a nervous system state, not a productivity stance. I wrote in several earlier issues about how I’ve been doing some deep restructuring, a period of wintering where nothing is really being monitored, managed, or performed.
I’m now several months into this (close to getting on the other side) and the best analogy I can give is what happens on the train from New Jersey to Virginia when I visit my calm, zero-drama family (that is not sarcasm, we are super chill).
Changing Engines, Not Just Gears
On that route, the second to last stop is Union Station in Washington DC, but an interesting thing happens there: there’s about a 30-minute delay so that the train can literally change engines. The tracks north of DC use overhead electric wires, so they need to switch to diesel.
This isn’t them tweaking the current engine… it’s literally stopping and switching engines.
If you’ve been making big changes or putting things into motion leading up to the kickoff of the New Year, one piece of advice I can offer:
Sometimes patience, not effort, is the name of the game.
The work becomes waiting. Some things don’t grow with more force. It doesn’t matter how loud I complain about the delay on the train in DC: I just need to wait.
Living unarmored means switching engines and slowing down enough to take the gear off and actually see what you’ve been putting yourself through: the hurts that have gone unnoticed while you were busy managing, performing, or just surviving.
My family today is very different, and we’ve individually engineered it to be that way. All we do during the holidays is sit around in sweats and hoodies. I don’t even pack jeans when I go visit.
This liminal week between Christmas and New Year’s is one of those rare permission slips to take the helmet off, to live unarmored – even if just for a few days.
I hope you enjoy it.