the shadow side of wintering

am i quietly interior, or bitterly superior?

During the week between Christmas and New Year’s, I suffered a gutting personal loss. The inward turn it inspired felt fitting: there’s so much darkness in the world and a polar vortex swirls where I live. Wintering’s the season, inside and out.

Wintering, as Katherine May suggests, is a time for making friends with darkness and unknowing. In the quiet, we process and transform, like bulbs doing invisible work under frozen ground. The parallels with grieving are obvious and I know these mysterious days have a lot to teach me, even if the lessons feel far from clear.

But sometimes with all that weight and waiting, I get confused. I start to think of sadness as the noblest emotion. Processing can shift from quiet interiority to bitter superiority. I know I’ve hit the shadow side when I’m mad about everybody else’s good time.

Starry Night // Jean-François Millet

We spent the turn of the year in Florida where the whole family got the Norovirus—except me, the designated nursemaid. Scrubbing matched my monastic mood… until I soured. Why were the boys, two-minutes into wellness, darting off to buy smoothies? It’s one thing to ask your mother to wash saltine-colored barf, but CHERRY MANGO? Fuck all of y’all.

I especially couldn’t stand the tan, smiling people riding bicycles with tennis racquets in their raffia baskets. So jolly! So twee! This is not the attitude we need to heal the world’s ailments, I scoffed, sniffing my sleeve to pinpoint what part of my arm smelled like vomit—forgetting that I, too, ride such a bike. If everyone would turn inward like me, mankind might save itself, I harrumphed.

Back from vacation, I struggled to leave the house, even though I felt disgusting and therefore withdrawn and therefore disgusting. My clothes were rumpled, my bed pocked with crumbs—I’d accidentally built a perfect nest for my intrusive thoughts. On Thursday, I finally dragged myself out to walk the dusky hills with a friend. I tried to cancel an hour before, but she didn’t pick up my call. An act of God.

Returning home, I noticed the tenor of my grief had shifted: a sweet, ripe feeling had replaced its acrid edge. Suddenly, I remembered that sadness isn’t all there is. And it’s definitely not a superior state of being.

Maybe I resisted the uplift because I didn’t want to betray my loss. But funny… the walk helped me go deeper. A hit of joy reminded me that grieving is only nutritive when it’s multi-dimensional. I’m bitter when I forget to sustain the depth with uplift.

I worry that 2025 will be a whole year of wintering. We’re awash in collective, unprocessed grief and overdue for deep reflection. I’ve often wondered why people seem so mad and righteous and the last few weeks have helped me understand—it’s tempting to evade grief with sanctimony; tempting, too, to sink into sadness until nothing else counts. The hardest work is holding the fullness of the in-between: one foot in front of the other, relishing the sunset while your heart’s in pieces.

I hope we all go inward this season—processing the fires and the ceasefire and the incoming administration (+ all our private heartaches, too). Wintering is psychic nourishment and collectively, we’re starved. But as we go deep, let’s stay tethered to the bright spots. Because we can only make meaning from the darkness when we put our light into it.

With love,

Isabel

Next week, I’ll write about my mid-winter joys for paid subscribers. Share yours now, if you’d like. (Or just give me your peeves and sanctimonies because relating is one of my joys.)