Every year, without fail, I abandon my garden.

Not in a dramatic, windswept, “nature reclaims all things” sort of way. More in a quiet, British, slightly passive-aggressive neglect. I simply… stop going in there.

It’s not even attached to the house. It sits about 30 paces away, behind a fence. Which, in winter, might as well be another country.

And sometime around October or November, I close the gate.

And then I don’t open it again until March. Or April. Or whenever I can no longer pretend that this is a perfectly reasonable way to behave.

Here’s what happens in between.

I think about the garden.
I inflate the garden.
I avoid the garden.
I feel bad about avoiding the garden.
I finally do the garden.
And then I wonder why on earth it took so long.

Over the months, the garden transforms in my mind.

It’s no longer a small, slightly scruffy patch of land with a few weeds and a lawn that’s got ideas above its station.

No. It becomes a full-scale wilderness.

I imagine brambles plotting against me. Grass growing at a rate that suggests ambition. Possibly a small ecosystem developing its own hierarchy. I half expect to need specialist equipment. Or emotional support.

At no point do I picture what it actually is: a bit of weeding, a mow, a general tidy.

Instead, I build it into an Event.

A job that requires:

• Time I don’t have

• Energy I haven’t yet located

• And a version of myself who is far more industrious than the one currently sitting down with a cup of tea

So I don’t open the gate.

Not today. Maybe tomorrow.

Tomorrow comes. Still no gate.

I think about opening it. I even picture it. Hand on latch. A decisive swing. Possibly a triumphant soundtrack.

And yet… nothing.

Instead, I walk past it. Casually. As if I’ve made a conscious decision not to engage, rather than being quietly intimidated by a patch of slightly overgrown grass.

And then one day — and this is the interesting bit — something shifts.

Not in a big, cinematic way.

There’s no burst of motivation. No sudden clarity. No life-changing realisation about the importance of garden maintenance.

I just… open the gate.

No ceremony. No build-up. No “this is the day.”

One minute I’m on one side of the fence. The next minute I’m on the other, pulling up weeds like this has been the plan all along.

And here’s the mildly annoying part.

It’s not that bad.

In fact, it’s… fine.

Satisfying, even.

There’s something deeply pleasing about clearing a space. About seeing immediate, visible progress. About remembering that the garden is not, in fact, a hostile environment.

Within a surprisingly short amount of time, it looks like a garden again.

Not a jungle. Not a lost cause. Just a garden.

Which raises an awkward question.

What, exactly, was all that about?

Because the work itself was never the problem.

The problem was the bit before the work.

The months of thinking about it.
The quiet dread.
The elaborate mental build-up.

The gate.

Or more specifically — the moment before opening it.

And it’s never just the garden, is it?

It’s the yoga mat you don’t roll out.
The email you don’t send.
The thing that would probably take twenty minutes, but somehow becomes a whole situation.

We turn small, ordinary actions into looming, slightly ominous entities.

We give them weight. Drama. A backstory.

And then we avoid them as if they’ve earned it.

What’s strange is that we know how this ends.

We know that once we start, it will be manageable.

We know we’ll feel better.

We know we’ll wonder why we didn’t do it sooner.

And still, we stand on one side of the gate.

Until, eventually, we don’t.

This year, when I finally opened it, there was no revelation waiting for me.

Just a slightly overgrown garden.

And a quiet sense that I’d made it much bigger than it needed to be.

It was never about the garden.

It was about the gate.