You can listen to this episode here: Listen to Episode 45: The Bittersweet Energy of September
September arrives with a rush of excitement for predictable routines, cool morning walks, and the return of rhythm... alongside nostalgia, grief, and a bittersweet melancholy that catches many of us off guard.
In this episode, Blaze explores the liminal space of late summer: the moment when culture is already pushing pumpkin spice and holiday momentum, but nature is still asking us to linger. She shares personal reflections on losing her brother in September, the Chinese five-element view of grief as a transitional season, and how she's using this fall as a practice space for setting boundaries with her daughter's growing independence. If you're feeling the pull between full-steam-ahead planning and tender remembering, this conversation offers language, validation, and a gentler pace you might long for.
🌿 In this episode we explore:
- Why September is a transition period — not yet autumn — and why rushing the season depletes us
- The bittersweet "happy-sads" of seasonal change and what Traditional Chinese Medicine's metal element teaches us about grief and melancholy
- How to stop rehashing painful memories without judgment ("it's okay to visit, but you don't live there")
- Reframing "productivity" language into what nourishes and bolsters your spirit
- Parenting through seasonal transitions: letting your child's experience be theirs and stepping into a supporting role
- How delegating chores became an unexpected lesson in choosing her own responsibilities
- Why energy is precious — and how to direct it without turning self-pacing into another performance
- An invitation to Blaze's autumn equinox gathering on September 23rd
Hello friends, welcome back. I'm recording this the week before Labor Day weekend and there's so much joy for me around September and being excited that the school year is starting. Excited for having a routine again that I can actually predict a whole lot better than I can through the entire summer.
I love how it starts to get cooler in the mornings and I feel more motivated to go for my morning walks because daylight savings hasn't happened. It's still really bright out.
The sun is up, but it's not overwhelmingly hot in the morning and there's more shade.
I love it, and there's still the sounds of the birds and the breeze, and I... love everything about this time of year.
I also think that there's a whole lot of processing though that happens as I transition from what was a really busy and intense summer into what turns into a very busy and intense fall.
And I'm sure a lot of you listening are feeling the same way. There are so many expectations set up around what it means to like start the autumn.
And whether or not you have a kid you still get inundated with all of the like pumpkin spice everything. We're already seeing Halloween decorations and soon it'll be Christmas stuff up.
We haven't even officially left the summer yet, and there's simultaneously all of the "get it before it's gone" energy around that where we're thinking, oh, if I don't go swimming right now, we all know that the water will get cold and we don't want to go into it anymore.
We know that pretty soon we're going to be raking our lawns instead of just enjoying that we have all these flowers and beautiful trees and all of that.
There's maintenance coming up. It just feels like you're kind of getting it from all of the directions.
All of these spoken and unspoken demands on our time and on our energy.
And I think that we're kind of expected to be really pleasant about it, no matter how that hits you.
I generally find my personal energy fluctuates a lot now.
I used to always find September to be like an incredibly joyful time and I still really do.
For me, it's always gonna be forever tinged now in that I lost my brother in September. And it makes me sad.
I don't like remembering difficult and sad things.
For me, moving through this contrastive feeling between being super excited
And like I'm welcoming back a part of myself that I miss all summer long, and like... I love routines.
I really love knowing exactly what's upcoming and being able to prepare for it. And I'm this person that likes to repeat things a lot. So if I get to have time to reread things and redo them and organize and stuff, I love that. I love the energy of September.
And I have a lot of nostalgia and grief and sadness and curious wondering about things that will come up probably forever now for this time of year.
I know when I was researching acupuncture a little bit and Chinese medicine.
Looking at the five elements, there's this section between like the fullness of summer and the like quiet reflection of the fall that's metal and it's a grief.
And it's about being with this bittersweet melancholy, I guess I would call it. And I find that really accurate, that there is definitely long swaths of days or weeks where I'll have a kind of melancholy feeling this time of year.
And I wanted to say, if you're feeling that too, it's appropriate and it's normal and it's kind of what the energy of the seasonal transition brings, where the leaves start drying out and getting more colorful.
It starts happening in subtle ways and it brings that sense of happy-sads is what I want to call it, where I love it and I also am sad about it.
And I have a lot of memories that have accumulated over my life that I always, I'm interested in revisiting and unfortunately my mind just wants to make meaning out of it all and come up with these complicated and sometimes unhelpful stories.
And so some of the ways that I combat that, well, one is to just accept that that's a human thing.
We're going to do that. We're going to want to make sense of our past. We're going to want to be digging into the why of everything.
And because I know that it's happening and it's going to happen, I'm not judging myself for it and I would recommend that no one do that to yourself.
If you're finding yourself hashing and rehashing things, it is normal, but to give yourself some grace with it and to recognize that you don't have to, make it important, I guess, or more than it is.
I like to let those moments pass, where I allow myself to think and to feel and to figure out what's going on. But when I find myself going too deep into a hole or finding myself, in pain, I guess, because of things that I'm thinking about.
I recognize that and say, "Oh, okay, Blaze, we're going to that place again, and it's okay to visit it, but you don't live there."
And I really remind myself that, you know, there's appropriate times and spaces for everything, nothing is wrong.
And it's okay to choose to move on from things that are too heavy or too upsetting or just not as productive.
You know, I don't even want to say that because I don't like thinking that every moment of my life needs to be productive.
But I'm trying to find the language to talk about this kind of moment. And when we look at ourselves, going over something and going over something and it's causing pain. I think the term that I've learned is like "that's not a productive use of my energy or my attention."
But I don't like saying that it's not productive. That just seems like such an American thing to say and I hate it. So I want to come up with new language for it and maybe to say that that isn't as nourishing or as bolstering to my spirit as perhaps moving into another activity or another mental space would be.
So I like to look at this, this big moment of this transition into September, because it's not even really the transition into fall. We talk about it as ushering in the autumn.
But it's not quite yet, it's actually late summer. And that we want to give ourselves some time before we start going into that deeper mental and internal space.
I think that we as a society tend to rush everything and want to really quickly transition from like, oh, it was summer and we're going on vacation all the time and we're doing all the activities and there's summer camps and there's travel and there's plotting out like every single party that I could possibly do, there's going out to movies and seeing if you can do like the outdoor mat, it's not a matinee, the outdoor ones at night where you go to the drive-in...
That kind of stuff is so much fun and I want to pack in as much as possible. But then there's like this instinct to just keep that energy moving constantly all the way through all the way into the holidays.
I don't even think of it as the end of the year. I think that we have this now. Barreling momentum towards celebrations and gatherings and I guess, like this cultivation by the culture of a festive spirit, even when that's really exhausting.
And my whole goal in life is to not be constantly exhausted, but to have enough energy to actually engage with my life and find it interesting and want to do stuff.
So returning to the original thought that there's this balance between rehashing the past and going deep into memory and maybe getting melancholy about it. And then the other side of trying to plan all these exciting fun things and pack in a lot of energy and momentum and movement.
I feel like for me, the most healthy thing to do is to pace myself and I'm trying to do it in ways that don't sound like it's also an effort to pace myself.
And I think it takes practice. It takes us remembering that, you know, the beginning of September isn't the end of anything. It's a transition time. It's okay if you're still going on vacations or wanting to go to the beach.
It's all right to make time for that. And it's also okay to recognize that, you know, soon it's time to start looking at our closets and switching into warmer clothes and making space for the things that we know are coming that we're unavoidably heading towards gatherings.
It's so funny. Like I'm already thinking about Thanksgiving.
It's the beginning of September. I'm thinking about, you know, Halloween is coming. And that's literally like two months away, but it feels like it's almost here because we're constantly hearing about it.
So that's another thing that I'm definitely noticing. And coming on the heels of my collaborative talk with Elizabeth.
This was very eye-opening to me about how much we carry with us, just in the general zeitgeist to recognize how much our minds are holding and how much emotion we're holding around everything that's happening in the world and that we are grappling also with what are we supposed to do about it and what's our part to play.
It can be a very exhausting realization. And so...
Making some space. I like that. Making some space this week to just be who I am and want what I want feels really important.
And I want to put that out to you as well. What is the thing that you want to make space for that feels like something that you want to do?
Something that maybe you felt like you missed from the summer, something that maybe you're worried that you might not be able to pack in in the autumn because truly...
There is more time and space than we believe there is right now. And...
It is super easy to very quickly start structuring our days, like immediately, with how things move into the fall.
Something that I mentally and emotionally try to do is recognize that I'm a separate person from my daughter and she can have a busy schedule. And sometimes I try to help her not have a busy schedule, but that doesn't mean that I also need to be as busy as her.
She's younger than me, she's got a lot going on, there is a ton of structure in her life.
That's great. It's perfect for where she's at in her life. But for me,
I don't need to be that busy. I don't think I should be that busy and it's okay for me to have, I don't want to say slower, but more steady; more rhythmic routines that suit my energy level, my pacing, and my enjoyment at this time in my life.
I don't need to feel, I guess, that I need to be a part of every single thing that she does. There's a desire for me to be a part of it.
But I'm recognizing that her experience is hers and mine is mine. And I don't need to delve as deep into all of her gatherings with friends and her after school activities and all of this stuff because it's not actually my activities and stuff.
So I try to keep a really healthy boundary there and find my balance between supporting her becoming the human that she's becoming and me still having my own life, my own interests, and things that I want to do and fill my time with.
Hmm, I also want to ask you this.
If you're a parent, if you're someone raising littles, you may find, as I do, that I get more and more snippy the more I feel like I'm being almost forced into having to manage when I don't want to.
It's hard to talk about because I think, like I know.
I want to be a good parent. I want to be there. I feel that it is my responsibility to make sure that my kid is safe and having fun and that she gets to have these activities and do stuff.
But I also understand that there's a limit to the amount of hanging out and watching the shows that she wants to watch and like being I guess a part of her gatherings with her friends. It's like starting to...
I mean, she's not a toddler anymore. She's allowed to have her times in spaces with these people.
And I think that's super beautiful and important for her to start growing this independence.
So I am now learning and I'm using the fall as like this practice space to say how much presence do I need to have around the edges of her gatherings?
So I kind of want to be part of her scenery.
But I don't want to be a focal point for her. And that transition, I think, is so difficult and tender for us as parents to start to give them that space and that kind of independence and liberty.
Because for so long, like they kind of are our entire responsibility.
And then they start growing up and we realize it can't be like that forever. She needs to learn how to do these things on her own.
I need to let her have space to have her fights, her dilemmas, her thoughts and her solutions.
And my job is really there to be a support and a reflection, obviously, to help prevent harm, but not to solve everything for her. It's about her learning how to solve her thing so that as she grows up, she has that ability, capability, desire, and belief in herself. That's an exciting thing.
So I'm looking at this season also, as, how do I foster that in her and how do I demonstrate it in life?
I love this idea of like, how do I demonstrate for her what this can look like? And I need to live it if that's the case.
So I'm trying to demonstrate to her that her life is hers, mine is mine, we both have priorities, we both need to pace ourselves and choose how we spend our time. It's been a really interesting conversation, actually.
That I'm kind of excited to share it with you about this delegation of "what do you think your chores should be" with my kid.
That actually has been really cool. It's an insight into the way her mind works, how she's deciding what her responsibilities she wants to have and how much she wants to take and how much I'm able to then let go and go, "Okay, well, what does that free up?"
It made me start asking myself the same kind of question for me as what do I want my responsibilities to be?
Where do I want to be spending my energy and recognizing that energy is precious?
I think when I look at the natural world, I know that we have this big crescendo in the summer, everything's building.
And then it becomes this downhill slope where we have the energy, but we're kind of using it. And I think of it also when I look at my app for the solar panels is that we go into this big energy production and then we're going to be using credits from that energy production through the winter as the sun starts producing less.
So I really see it mirrored so many places in my life that we only have so much attention span. We only have so much energy.
It is precious. Where do I want to direct it so I don't deplete myself and how can I feel like a master of that without turning that also into something that I have to do or prove or perform for anybody else?
I'm really curious how you all experience that and what your thought process or feeling is, like how you actually implement it in your life.
For me, I'm recognizing that I really love my quiet mornings. I love my morning walks. I love being able to start the day with some nature time and interacting outside.
I've really been missing the ravens that were really prominent in the springtime and I befriended that whole family but now that we're entering the fall, like everybody's kind of grown up and gone off in August, so I only hear them occasionally passing through.
But I love still being aware and cultivating that awareness and connection.
And it takes me being present and getting my butt outside to do that. I find that everything about this beginning of September is like expansive and bittersweet at the same time.
It's so exciting to have this opportunity to reorganize my schedule and simultaneously realize that a chapter is closing that I'm not going to visit again. I'm going to have another summer.
But next summer with my kid is gonna be so different 'cause she just keeps growing and changing and becoming this, you know, more fully formed person of herself and her personality and her desires and her ability to do stuff just keeps growing. So witnessing that is amazing.
Meanwhile, I have my own life, my own relationships, my friendships that I'm also excited that I get to cultivate in a deeper way over the fall.
I'm also kind of surprised and yet not. Every year it comes as a shock at how much we think that the summer's going to be about socializing with all of our friends and then realizing everybody's too busy to even socialize. So it really starts happening again around this time of year.
So I'm making space for that and excited that it's becoming possible again to see everybody as schedules get more regular.
Hmm, yes. So I think in conclusion this week I would say
While there's this temptation to full steam ahead and plan everything out really hardcore, I don't know that it's really time for that yet.
I think of this as this time of testing and it's like revisiting the dreaming of the late winter, early spring, where you start to dream about, well, what do you want this season to look like? What could be possible? And trying things and then finding what really works.
And then as I'm doing that and as we kind of get into the rhythm of the autumn and we're actually releasing the summer energy. That's when it becomes really easier and more natural to get into a reflection phase where we really do look at, well, what really did happen this year?
What do I want to continue to happen? What was the real reality of what happened? Am I judging myself against an ideal version or against the actual reality?
There's such a tendency for us as humans to want to scale ourselves and give ourselves a score about how good or bad we think we did and how many things we think we accomplished.
And I want to break that habit in myself and I'm hoping to offer a sense of relief to any of you listening that, you know, you don't have to live your life like that.
It is okay to just be you experiencing the world and you don't need to ever think that you have a scorecard on that.
And because we all secretly have our little scorecards, there's ways to manage that, that feel better.
And it is something that I go into when I do my autumn gathering with everybody on the equinox. This year, it's just like the day after, on September 23rd. But we get together and we really look at what this season is ushering in.
Take a look at reflecting back on everything that actually happened this year and help you personally sort through it so that you have a really clear sense of what's going on and find your internal equilibrium,
What it is that you personally see, what you experienced and what you want, in a really cozy and supportive setting with people who are also going through that process and are setting themselves up to have a really cozy and awesome autumn leading into winter.
I really look forward to it.
If you want to learn more, go ahead and click the link in the show notes. And I can't wait to talk to you next week. I'll see you then.
🌿 Keep exploring the seasonal rhythm series: This episode sits at the turning point from late summer into autumn — a threshold Blaze has explored from many angles across the podcast. These conversations trace the arc from protecting your summer energy, to reflecting without shame, to preparing your capacity before the fall rush begins:
- Ep 34: Summer Isn't for Doing More: How to Sustain Energy Without Burning Out — Why summer is the season for tending what you've already planted, not planting new seeds
- Ep 41: The Ripening of Your Life: How to Trust the Process and Stop Rushing — Settling into the life you're actually living, instead of the one you think you should be living
- Ep 43: Decision Fatigue & Nervous System Saturation: How to Restore Before Fall — Restoring your depleted nervous system before autumn begins
- Ep 09: Reflecting Without Shame — A Year-End Ritual — A kinder way to look back, without scorecards or self-scoring
- Ep 24: Why Setting Boundaries Feels So Uncomfortable at First (And Why It Gets Easier) — For anyone loosening their grip on old roles, in parenting and beyond
✨ Ready to move into autumn with steadiness instead of sprint? Join Blaze's cozy autumn equinox gathering on September 23rd — a cozy, supportive space to reflect on your year without judgment and find your internal equilibrium for the season ahead. Click this link to learn more and save your spot.
And if you're ready to build rhythms that match your natural energy, grab the free Living in Rhythm Starter Kit or simply join our email list at Soul Letters.
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