I hate February. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t hate February, when it didn’t make me want to blow up my life (no matter what that life looked like, no matter how well I liked it the rest of the time) and start from scratch.

In Colorado, February is a tease. It’s when spring flowers start to peek out, and you think winter is finally over. At the house where I grew up, we’d start seeing crocuses and grape hyacinths, and some years also tulips and daffodils. Trees might start blooming. And then BAM! March and April and sometimes even May would bring feet of snow, flowers would die, and I’d think winter was never going to be over.

In the northern climes where I got my higher education, February was pure winter, another month of snow blanketing everything, of fingers and toes going numb as I walked to class, of perilously icy roads. Here in the south, February is pollen season, and pollen means allergies. I have to use the windshield wipers every time I get into the car to clear the yellow scrim away. My entire face is swollen, and my tear ducts feel ready to burst, and I am sleeping like hibernation is a thing humans do.

So February is doldrums. In February the difference between “rewriting my life story” and “settling” collapses and all the disappointments I usually keep locked in the cellar burst out and have a Mardi Gras party. February is the month I do things like shave my head or get a new tattoo or piercing or move to Seattle, and then I crash because I realize I’m the same old person in the same old life. In February I want to take exotic vacations, meet new people, dress up and go out dancing, have new adventures. Those desires invariably smack headlong into reality, so to circumvent the inevitable disappointment, I end up barricading myself at home and reading as many books as I can and then feeling even worse about everything. I feel like I’m marking my life in books read.

And I don’t want to just mark time. I want to be present and engaged, because life is too short to just endure. I’m telling myself March will be better: March will bring travel and time with some of my favorite people, and the pollen will eventually subside, and maybe I will start to feel like part of the human race again. But in the meantime, there is February to grapple with, and I haven’t yet found a way to make peace with it.