A small spring
A letter for the follicular week, and the temptation to race through it.
Dear my friend,
There is a morning — usually around Day 7 or 8, often a Tuesday for some reason — when you wake up and the room is a slightly different colour.
Nothing has changed in the room. The light is what it always is. But you, your slow recovering recently-bled self, are meeting it differently. The heaviness has lifted. Your skin feels warm in a way it didn't on Day 3. Coffee suddenly sounds excellent rather than mandatory. You think, with quiet surprise, Oh. I'd like to wash my hair.
This is follicular week. The light coming back to the kitchen. Small birds returning to the garden of your nervous system, etc.
I want to talk to you about it, because you have probably been told the wrong things.
You have been told that follicular is your peak. That this is the week to schedule the difficult meetings, the heavy workouts, the ambitious projects, the social plans you couldn't bring yourself to make the week before. You have been told to ride the wave. To make the most of the energy returning to your body. To turn the gentle warming of your hormones into something productive. You have been handed your weather report as if it were a starting gun and, frankly, told to win.
I'd like to offer you a different idea.
Follicular is not a peak. Follicular is a spring.
Go and look at a garden in early March. The first shoots are tiny. They are not trying to be August. They are not embarrassed about being three centimetres tall. They emerge into the gentle warmth — slowly, as warmth does — and they spend a few weeks being small and green and quietly delighted with themselves.
That is the energy on offer in your follicular week.
You have just spent a week — or two, depending — in a quiet, mineral-deep, body-emptying winter. Your hormones were near zero. You bled. You were tired in the particular way that only end-of-cycle tired can be. And now the temperature has shifted, and the first warm air has reached you, and the impulse of every wellness account on the internet is to immediately hand you a checklist of ambitious things to schedule in your high-energy follicular phase!!!
Here is the thing. The energy you have on Day 8 is not the energy you have on Day 12. The energy you have on Day 12 is not the energy you have at ovulation. You are not at your peak. You are at the beginning of your peak, which — I cannot stress this enough — is a completely different season.
A small spring asks for a different response than a roaring summer.
So I am suggesting, gently, that you might consider using this week for things that do not appear on any productivity influencer's spreadsheet of ambitious projects to schedule in follicular. Things like:
Buying flowers from the corner shop. Buying a small ridiculous thing that has caught your eye. Trying a recipe that interests you but does not particularly need to be made. Walking somewhere by a slightly different route — even, especially, if it adds twenty minutes. Reading a novel in the middle of the afternoon. A novel. The slowest format we still have, and a perfect spring activity. Eating a peach somewhere slightly overdressed. Calling a friend just to describe something. Picking up an unfinished sentence from a notebook you abandoned last September. Wearing the colour. Going to a museum to see one specific painting and then leaving. Having dessert before dinner because the strawberries looked good. Naming the trees on your street. Starting a wholly unnecessary collection. Re-reading a children's book you loved when you were eight. Letting an idea wander around your mind for several days without making it earn its keep.
If this sounds insufficient — what about the goals, what about the projects, what about catching up on everything I avoided in luteal — I want you to notice something. The catching-up impulse is older than your cycle. It is the impulse that has been running you since you learned to feel behind. Follicular did not invent it. Follicular is the week your body offered to renegotiate it, and the wellness industry hijacked the renegotiation to sell you a different brand of striving in a slightly nicer wrapper.
The garden in March does not catch up on August. It does what March asks of it, which is small and green and surprisingly competent.
So — your follicular week. Use it for whatever you'd like, of course. I am not the boss of you. But I will tell you what I have come to use mine for. Small things. Slow things. Things I wouldn't have had the brightness for in luteal but which don't yet require the broadcasting energy of ovulation. Curiosity, mostly. A bit of whimsy. The pleasures that don't show up on a quarterly review.
A small spring is allowed to be small.
You are allowed to be smaller than your hormones suggest you could be, if smaller is what feels right that week.
You are allowed to use your returning energy on something useless and lovely instead of something important and difficult.
The most cycle-aware thing you can do, some weeks, is refuse the entire conversation about making the most of anything.
The light is back in the kitchen. Notice it. Pour something warm. Choose a small joy.
The next four weeks will arrive in their own time.
With care, Freyja
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