My Season of Wintering

Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.
—Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

I’m in the middle of a rough patch.

Ugh. It actually hurts my soul to say that out loud—or write it, as the case may be. I am actually learning, in real time, just how stubborn and steadfast I’ve been about being positive. About choosing only to turn my confident, optimistic face to the world and to make sure that my actions—and especially my writing—reflect only that face. Of course, I mostly want to add something of value to the world—to be generous and helpful—but I’ve also realized in the past few weeks, how much this mindset has become part of my identity and of my central image of myself. Who am I, if I am not that smiling woman I see in the pictures of myself? And to be honest, it hasn’t been that hard. I was raised by a very optimistic and positive mother and I think I am naturally predisposed, especially as I grow older, to look on the bright side of things and to embrace possibility, even when life gets challenging. Like everybody my age, I’ve weathered grief and disappointment, heartbreak and plain old sadness, but in recent years, I have almost been surprised at my consistent ability to thrive in adversity and to rely on my inner dialogue and my own healthy habits to restore me to myself.

Until now.

I don’t want to be overly dramatic here and even as I begin to think about how to describe the past few weeks, I feel compelled to say that I know that people deal with so much worse and I know that the fact that I even have the energy and wherewithal to write about this suggests that it’s not that bad. But the truth is that, to me, it really does feel that bad.

Long story short, I hurt my back. I slipped a disc in my cervical spine and for the past three weeks, I have been in almost-constant acute pain. It’s the kind of pain that first sent me to urgent care, and the next day to the hospital emergency room, and the next day to a sports medicine doctor and then a few days later, to a wonderful osteopathic doctor, who sent me to a pain management specialist. It’s the kind of pain that has me taking a bunch of medications that make me feel like a zombie. And the kind of pain that wakes me up in the middle of the night and is so excruciating that I can do nothing but weep and pray as I pace around the house, trying to decide between heat and ice and which of the many medications sitting on the counter I’m supposed to take.

But, this is just the physical part. The mental part starts with the fact that we are in the middle of the holiday season and I had to stay home from Thanksgiving dinner with my family because I was in so much pain. I tearfully had to cancel a visit with my grandkids who live on the other side of the country and were only in town for a few days. I have missed two Christmas parties that I love and we have had to forego hosting our annual party. To add insult to injury, apparently the end of the year is the worst time to seek medical care, when people are rushing to get their procedures in while their deductibles are covered. My insurance company, who I have touted for decades as being so great, has been slow and non-responsive. I’m sill waiting on an MRI authorization and have had to cancel two hard-to-schedule appointments so far. I walked into the pain management injection appointment yesterday, waiting for them to authorize paying for it. I sat in the waiting room, listening to the office manager argue with them and was fully prepared to pay the $2000 it would cost out of pocket, if they did not. Thankfully, they did.

I have been home from work for weeks and I feel so emotionally exhausted and hurt that I really don’t feel like talking to anyone. And with all this time to myself, when I’m not sleeping, I find myself going down rabbit holes that I didn’t even know existed. I have cried more in the past few weeks than I have in the past few years. I have literally sobbed on the phone with everyone from my health insurance company to the clerk at Rite Aid to my dearest friends who check on me often, not to mention, my sweet husband, who feels so helpless to help me.

I keep thinking about the phrase chronic pain and as if the universe is conspiring against me, my algorithms feed me article after article about people who suffer debilitating back pain for decades, who are addicted to drugs that change them completely and who literally retreat from their lives. (I am purposely avoiding writing about the recent murder of the insurance executive, because it just hits too close to home.) I imagine having to retire before I plan to, not being able to hike or coach tennis or play pickleball. I think about travel and actually look at the cancellation policy for a big trip we have booked in February. I imagine a future where I can no longer do the things I love. I know it’s crazy and, even as I write this, I think about my friend Lesa’s very wise words a few days ago: This is your mind playing tricks on you. You’re not yourself right now. Your pain is feeding you fear. And I know she is right.

But, still.

So, I’m not really sure how I remembered this book I’d heard about a few months ago—Wintering by Katherine May. I didn’t read the book, but I was drawn to the word wintering and after looking into it a little bit, I learned that it was initially a term used in biology to describe how certain animals and birds, and even plants, survive cold seasons. Wintering involves reducing activity, conserving energy, and drawing on stored resources. Katherine May appropriated the term to describe how people, like wintering animals, need periods of pause and retreat to survive life’s difficult seasons.

She writes: “In our relentlessly busy contemporary world, we are forever trying to defer the onset of winter. We don’t ever dare to feel its full bite, and we don’t dare to show the way that it ravages us. An occasional sharp wintering would do us good. We must stop believing that these times in our lives are somehow silly, a failure of nerve, a lack of willpower. We must stop trying to ignore them or dispose of them. They are real, and they are asking something of us. We must learn to invite the winter in. We may never choose to winter, but we can choose how.”

I’m not going to say that the realization that I am in the middle of my own harsh winter makes me feel much better, but it is helping me to forgive myself for being so hurt and sad—and human. It’s giving me permission to let myself fall into this unfamiliar place, not to stay, but to feel more at home with all the seasons of my life. It turns out that I don’t need to conjure up any heroics about positive thinking at this very moment, nor do I need to access my most resilient and ebullient self. I simply need to tuck in with a good book or two, retreat a little from the world at large—and maybe my own idea of myself—and take good care of my aching body as it heals.