What is a solo season?
Let’s start by defining what your “solo season” is and what it looks like. Your solo season is an intentional period of time where you focus primarily, consistently and unapologetically on yourself.
It’s the due diligence and inventory one must take on themselves in order to fully identify what areas of their own life they may need to nurture, fulfill, or focus on their growth in.
This is an honest look at your life and your well-being to determine where you could do some repairs and/or restoration.
Self care has been a heavily saturated term and niche used especially for the past few years by so many different people and that’s a good thing. This is awareness. The awareness that we must take care of ourselves before we can take care of anyone else. The concept of “you can’t pour from an empty cup” is exactly the inspiration you need to maneuver through this time of a solo season.
So how do I know it’s time?
So there’s two ways to answer this. One being, anytime. Remember this is an intentional season, which means go into it whenever you want or feel the need to. This is about you. Your needs. You are entitled to this and you should be eager to maximize everything you can gain from it.
Another way to answer this question is to look at the signs of this time not being wanted but being needed.
There are actually a variety of reasons why we should take this period to ourselves but here are some signs that it should be sooner than later:
You Feel Overworked and Overwhelmed.
For obvious reasons this is a huge tell-tell sign. When life is life-ing. When you have an overwhelming feeling of stress and you feel as though you have been stuck in autopilot with little to no stops. Many of us reach a point where being mentally drained exceeds being physically drained but we can actually physically feel it. A huge part of this is the work that we do on a daily basis. Depending on your position you have a role to fill and may feel or actually be told there’s an expectation of you to be a high level performer, but don’t do this at the expense of your peace of mind. How does your career make you feel? How does each day end? Are you thriving in this position and feel fulfilled or do you have feelings of stress and seemingly dread starting your work day? Is this something that you really want to change but you’re just sticking it out, or are you actively working towards changing your circumstances? Feeling overwhelmed and not being able to fully grasp how to maneuver through it can leave us feeling drained, so it is with hope that choosing to go into a solo season will allow you to sort through the underlying emotions you are having and figure out ways that you can prioritize your self care needs.
You Want To Change The Trajectory of Your Life
If you just generally feel like your life lacks things that you need. If you have come into a self awareness that the path you have been on is not truly fulfilling. Something is missing. You need more and you want more for yourself. You have that epiphany that “this just isn’t working for me anymore”, so what now? This could be an indicator that you have been living life for other things and possibly putting other people ahead of your own life, which can happen very easily for women, but it’s natural for you to come to terms with the idea that it just isn’t enough anymore and that life is too short to continue to let it pass by without experiencing more of it [life]. So going into a season of solitude will allow you to be intentional about your focus. You can get back to you for a moment. Figure out the things you want for yourself.
You want to focus on your life’s purpose.
This is also in alignment with changing the trajectory of your life but when you are not clear on what you should be doing with your life, what your purpose is, what you are really passionate about and how those two things should be connected, at a certain age, this should be something that speaks to you loudly, so if you’re not clear on that, a solo season will allow you to explore the things you are passionate about. Center with yourself and find your true heart desires. Figuring out what type of imprint you will leave in this world. How do you want to shape your life? What career path do you want to take or what business do you want to build? What things are you exceptionally great at? What gifts do you have that you are just sitting on? What do you want your next 10 year timeline to reflect? These are all questions that will allow you to create the image of your purpose if you just allow yourself the uninterrupted time to do so.
When you are seeking clarity and answers.
Sometimes the universe just needs you to be still. The universe needs you to quiet your surroundings so you can quiet your mind and it will guide you. When you are always on go mode, moving through life at such a fast pace because you have so much on your plate you may miss a few things. Maybe you have figured out your purpose and know exactly what you want to do and maybe you’re even doing it. But things aren’t connecting the way you intended them to or maybe you have come to a crossroads with certain aspects of your life and you have developed an anxiety on what to do next, which way to go but you haven’t been able to actually stop and reflect…this is a sign that you need a season of intentional clarity and this may involve you trying out or getting back into meditation, going back to church if that’s your thing and you’ve been missing out.Maybe you need to attend some services alone. Maybe finally taking the idea of therapy seriously and giving it a try. Going away for an extended vacation. Just whatever you need to do in order to get the answers you need, your solo season should be designed to do this.
When you have been deeply hurt by something or someone.
The healing journey. This is such a very pivotal time in your life because after you have been caused what feels like an immeasurable pain in your life at the hands of someone else you are liable to go to a very dark place. Your emotions are very fragile, your mind can be confused, and your heart just hurts. The healing journey is a time where the solo season can be beneficial because you need a safe space to feel all of those feelings. You need time to work on yourself and sort through your emotions. When you’ve been hurt by someone you may go to a place in your mind that shapes how you see yourself and how you see others, and that can be very detrimental to your future and the future of your relationships. Broken trust can be very damaging to us and if we don’t properly nurture our feelings during this time it could cause us to have some very negative experiences and outlooks on life going forward and cause us to carry things into our future that we don’t actually need, like carrying the burden of someone else’s choices. When someone betrays you, that is not supposed to be your burden to carry but because we are human we feel the impact of it because it was “done to us” so we are immediately affected. But if we don’t allow ourselves to properly heal from that, we run the risk of possibly hurting others. Hurt people, hurt people right and we can hurt them with not just our actions but with our words, with our doubt in them, or with our inability to understand who they are because all we can see is someone else. Healing is not linear, so that means it doesn’t look a certain way. It doesn’t have to have a time frame on it. You can’t just force yourself to be healed by the end of 30 days. You have to actively work on it. You have to find moments of peace in your healing, find joy, find relief, grasp understanding, capture some reflection, you have to embrace the lessons and hopefully find the blessings.
And you have to find the red flags that you may have missed so that you can learn how to build your boundaries in a healthy way. Seek council if necessary. You have to learn how to identify how you were hurt and how you can now nurture your self love and self value in order to overcome that pain. So going into a season of solitude during your healing process is both important and necessary for your growth through that time. You need that time and space alone to unapologetically feel those feels.
What the solo season IS and IS NOT…
Remember that your solo season is “custom”. So it’s important to understand that it will be what you need and make it out to be but it doesn’t necessarily have to be about isolation and closing yourself off from the rest of the world. Solitude and isolation can be two different perspectives if you’re clear on what they mean to you.
And it is not a time where you have to necessarily be single. That’s an important piece to understand. In fact women that have been in long term relationships and are at a point where they need to evaluate whether or not that relationship is still serving them could benefit highly from going into this season because it forces you to reflect more on what the relationship gives and does for you vs. what you have been giving to the relationship. Or on the contrary to that, what you yourself may need to work more towards to add value to that relationship as an individual.
A season of solitude doesn’t have to be about refusing to see or talk to anybody else. It doesn’t mean that you can’t spend time with anyone and it doesn’t mean that your life as you know it should exclude everyone from your world, but you understand that taking some time to yourself is okay and you can do that guilt free.
It just means that during this time you are going to intentionally change the flow of how things have been moving to focus on yourself, your needs, your well being, your self care, your self love, your choices and the path you choose to take. It’s about gaining more than it is about separating. You will gain insight and inspiration. You will gain an appreciation for yourself and understand what areas of your life need your attention. It’s about being intentional about filling up your own pitcher so that you have the ability to pour into other cups when you can.
This solo season is about creating and designing. Creating moments of focus so that you can design your life’s portrait.
Self Reflection Question
If you had to imagine what your life would look like in one portrait that you could hang on your wall and look at it for years to come, what would it look like? If you aren’t sure or need time to figure that out, maybe it’s time for your solo season.
Something to Remember…
This is not a time to feel guilty about going into this period. Again, this is an unapologetic and intentional time of your life and the reality is that if we go through our adult lives without taking these periodic “self check-ins” we are liable to miss monumental moments of clarity and increased opportunities for growth.
Until next time my lovelies.
Peace &. Blessings
If you are interested in following along with the podcast for the Solo Series be sure to check out the Thoughts of a Blog Queen Podcast available on all podcast streaming platforms.
Links to Part 1 of this blog and podcast series are below:
Blog Post: “Going into Her Solo Season: Deeper Thank Singleness/ Pt 1” Going Into Her Solo Season
Podcast Entry for Part 1:
The podcast episode for part one is below . Be sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you can be notified when new episodes in this series, including this part 2 are uploaded.
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