I have, for years, tried to understand the depths of some people’s difficulty with winter and also to attempt to explain how I feel it is such a necessary part of life. Trust me, I hate being cold – and I am nearly always cold. But I feel there is much more to it than temperature or grey skies.
A few months ago I stumbled on a book called, ‘Wintering,’ by Katherine May and I found that the essence of it was what I had clumsily been trying to say for years. That, wintering is a part of life that is difficult, often upsetting and pushed away – but necessary. As much as nature needs the winter season to reset and rest, so do we need to acknowledge and allow our emotional winters. And I think, that the two may be connected.
We live in a world where we have a culture of carefully constructed oversharing of problems where some people play the minutiae of their lives out on social media, but also, curated over-simplifying optimism. You can barely move for positive quotes slapped on everything from bedsheets to bumper stickers. I feel, sadly, that both are somehow disingenuous because both face outwards, when it is within that needs to be looked after.
Humans are emotionally messy creatures and like the dreaded kitchen drawer, full to the brim of stuff and nonsense that we just can’t face going through, we hide away the difficult things.
Sometimes it is necessary for a while. Sometimes we don’t realise we are doing it. But it doesn’t matter why, what is true is that, eventually, these things will have to be dealt with.
I am facing what I know to be a period of winter. It has happened before and I knew it would arrive again. Let me bring you up to speed with my cancer situation because I haven’t written about it since being told it had spread further than thought. At that point in time, I had just finished five months of weekly chemotherapy. I had had more surgery to remove all the lymph nodes on my upper right hand side and was in the middle of three weeks of daily radiotherapy. There followed six more months of chemotherapy and if I’m honest, I’m still not sure how I did it. At the end of this, routine scans and blood tests followed, bringing with them a punch. The CT scan showed a lump that they couldn’t identify and the oncologists weren’t happy with my bloods. An ultra sound was done and again – there was a lump that they weren’t sure of. Two biopsies and more blood tests were taken. The next ten days were an agony I can’t explain. I was genuinely not sure, that if they said I had to do more chemotherapy, that I would agree to it. Three days before Christmas I received the best gift – the biopsies showed that the unidentified lump was scar tissue.
Scars come in many forms, the physical, which my upper right hand body is now almost entirely cross hatched with, and the mental and emotional.
I am of course, beyond happy to have been given the all clear, but I am not cartwheeling for two reasons. Firstly, the cancer having already recurred once, I can no longer ever fully believe that, that will be that. Secondly, the hard work is far from over. Aside from physical recovery (which takes years and some things will never be the same again) I now face everything I had to put on hold before. When you go through cancer treatment, you do not have the luxury of being able to deal with the mental and emotional trauma. You can’t. Your job, at that point is to get through treatment. One step in front of the other getting through the day-to-day practicalities. But when all the appointments stop, everything comes crashing down and you are suddenly faced with every bit of loss, grief, fear, worry, pain, guilt and anger that you had to put to one side while you just got on with staying alive as best as possible.
It is tempting to try keep these things at bay. But it won’t work. Unbidden they arrive without warning. And so, this is my winter now, to feel the sting and cold of them, to be vulnerable in the harshness of what is to come. But I am not scared because to winter, is to live every part of life fully.
I wrote the following thoughts standing in my bathroom, post shower, which in my opinion, is where all the best thinking happens, bar walking in the rain.
People find it hard to winter when they find it hard to spend time with themselves. Winter creates introspection and reflection by necessity as there are more hours alone, in darkened light and silence. It creates spaces that, normally filled with people and busyness, now lie open, leaving room for thoughts – all those thoughts we try to avoid. Wintering is hard work. But necessary. If trees didn’t cut off supply to their leaves, pull back their sap and draw their resources inward to their main core, they would be beaten and destroyed and unable to endure the harshness of harder times. This new year, instead of accumulating new habits, new resolutions and demands on ourselves, perhaps we need to let go. Reduce our thoughts, curtail unwanted patterns of behaviour, stock take on our beliefs and stored experiences and gently and kindly look them in the eye. Lay them out, inspect what you have accumulated through the year and choose what to keep. And let the rest go. Strip your leaves. You may feel exposed for a while, vulnerable even, but in reality you are looking after yourself and all the potential for the months to come. Let go of things willingly, but not blindly. Acknowledge them fully, say their name, speak it out loud, there is power in doing so. It becomes a purposeful act and one to which you can hold yourself accountable: “I choose to willingly let go of…” By doing this you acknowledge your ownership of what is not sitting correctly within you: bad feelings, behaviours or thoughts you have been holding on to and also you realise your active choice to let these things go. This is hard because by doing this you have to hold yourself to account . It is no longer possible to be the victim and say, “but X made you feel like this,” or, “Y is the reason you can’t move on.” If the resulting negative thoughts and feelings live within you – they are yours. You own them. No-one is an infinite vessel. We cannot keep with us, everything we ever experience. Examine also whether the things you are holding are really yours or are you being something else for someone else. When wintering you have to acknowledge the truth of who you are and whether you are living in true resonance with what you believe at your core. A dormouse who gets through winter by hibernating, will not survive long if they try to live like a fox. The Spring clean is a notion out of season. In spring we do not want to be in looking at an accumulation of stuff, dirt, mess; we want to be out, coming alive and moving. So winter. Use the long dark days, the quieter times to prepare yourself. Draw your sap back into your core: the things you truly believe, the ones you wholly love. Look at all the rest. Spend time in winter to really see and feel the things you have pushed away to deal with later. What leaves can you shed? Will you willingly let them go?
I thoroughly recommend reading ‘Wintering’, by Katherine May.
